What Is Email Archiving?

If you’re looking to improve email management and protect important data, it’s a good idea to archive emails in your mailbox. However, you might not understand what email archiving is, or why it’s a good habit to get into. 

Email archiving enables you to store important emails securely and protect the historical data contained in them. But, there are tons of other benefits since it frees up storage space and better organizes your mailbox.

In this post, we’ll take a closer look at email archiving. Then, we’ll talk about the difference between email archiving and email backups. After that, we’ll discuss the importance of picking a quality email host. Let’s get to it!

What Is Email Archiving?

First off, let’s talk about what’s actually happening on the back end when you’re archiving emails.

With email archiving, you’re simply storing email messages where they are out of sight. Basically, archived email messages will be removed from your inbox and stored in a separate, secure location. This reduces the load on your mail server, cleans up your inbox, and makes archived data easily accessible.

Archiving emails is a good habit to get into when it comes to a personal inbox. But, it can also be useful for large businesses.

That’s because it enables you to store messages that you don’t need direct access to right now (but may need in the future). The good news is that there are tons of email archiving solutions that you can implement in your organization.

For example, ArcTitan or Mimecast make great options if you’re looking for an email archiving solution for your business:

All email archiving tools work slightly differently, but here are some key features you might want to look out for in an email archiving system:

• Cloud based email archiving allows you to store archived data away from your existing mail server (compared to on-premises email archiving software).
• Compliance support to make sure you adhere to local and global laws on data privacy.
• Searchable repository to quickly find and retrieve past emails (especially for litigation purposes).
• Easy to deploy (and integrate with your existing email provider). For example, a managed service may be best for organizations that don’t have an IT team.

In general, email archiving solutions help protect, preserve, and manage important email data.

They can help improve email discovery, and if you use a cloud based email archiving solution, it’s less expensive and more scalable than on-premises storage tools.

Why Is Email Archiving Important?

Now that you know what email archiving is, let’s take a look at some of the main benefits:

• Better organization. You can de-clutter your inbox and make archived emails easy to find and access.
• Storage management. You can reduce the load on your email server to help your inbox run quicker. This also means that you don’t need to keep deleting emails to stay within your mailbox quotas.
• E-discovery. You can easily (and quickly) obtain information in an electronic format for litigation purposes, audits, and more.
• Recovery after hacking events. Archived data makes it easier to restore your inbox following cyberattacks.
• Legal protection. You can make sure that no email data is accidentally deleted or lost, so that it’s readily available when requested by legal teams.
• Regulatory compliance. For your organization to operate legally, it needs to abide by specific email retention policies and freedom of information acts that make it compulsory to keep records and archives of your email communications.
• User monitoring.Implementing email archiving enables you to define policies and rules about the contents of employee emails.
• Productivity. You can quickly identify any email using advanced filters. Plus, depending on your email archiving solution, you may be able to automate certain tasks like email retention policies and categorization.

To put it simply, archiving historical messaging data in a secure location is a legal requirement for many organizations. Additionally, it can help you avoid problems with data storage, and make inboxes easier to deal with.

Email Archives vs Email Backups

Email archiving is a comprehensive process that enables you to retain old email messages for as long as you like. However, you also have the option to create an email backup which produces an exact copy of your email database at a given point in time.

In some ways, email archiving and email backups work similarly. They both provide a way to restore lost data, but here are the main differences between them:

• Email backups are designed for short-term recovery, but email archiving is a long-term solution.
• Archived messages have the added benefit of searchability and organization.
• Email backups make copies of your entire database, whereas you can target specific email messages with an email archiving solution.
• Email backups require more storage as the original content is essentially duplicated.

Since email archiving is a long-term fix that reduces strain on your server and prevents data loss, it is usually the best choice for most organizations. However, there’s no harm in using email backups for extra security.

This is because email backups can mitigate the damage caused by hardware failures, human errors, and cyberattacks like ransomware infections. But, it’s important not to solely rely on email backups since a fresh backup tends to replace previous ones and could lead to the permanent loss of email messages.

The Importance of Choosing a Quality Email Hosting Service

Implementing an email archiving solution makes your emails more secure and easier to manage. But, if emails are core to your business, it’s also important to choose a quality email hosting service.

This way, you can set up a custom email address (which adds credibility to your business). SirsteveHQ is an excellent option, and you can even access free email hosting (with certain web hosting packages).

Since SirsteveHQ uses up-to-date email authentication protocols (like SPF and DKIM), it also provides an opportunity to improve email deliverability. As such, with SirsteveHQ, you’re likely to see more engagement with your emails like higher open-rates, clicks, and conversions.

Plus, you’ll also get private IP addresses. And, you can set up an unlimited number of email accounts. This can be useful if you want to create separate emails for different departments or employees.

If you would like to use SirsteveHQ as your email host, the easiest way to get started is to register a domain name for your website. You can use this free domain search tool to find the right option for you.

Ideally, it’s best to create a unique email domain that matches your website name. That’s because this is important for consistency and branding.

Alternatively, if you don’t have a website yet, you might prefer to purchase one of SirsteveHQ’s web hosting packages to access the email service. You can find dedicated WordPress and Windows plans.

Plus, with every plan, you’ll get a free SSL certificate. Meanwhile, you’ll be able to manage all your domains, website tools, and email accounts from the SirsteveHQ client area.

Conclusion

If you run an organization, it’s vital to be able to store email messages in a secure environment. You’ll need a way to search and retrieve these emails to ensure legal compliance, or to recover quickly following hacking events.

Fortunately, you can use an email archiving solution to improve the organization of your inbox, reduce the load on your email servers, and create a searchable repository. Better yet, you can use an email host like SirsteveHQ to improve email engagement and employ up-to-date authentication protocols.

Do you have any questions about email archiving? Let us know in the comments section below!