Email archiving solutions automatically store copies of email content, meta-data, and attachments in a safe and immutable database, from which they can be searched and retrieved when needed. There are several reasons it’s important for organizations to deploy an email archiving solution: storage to comply with data protection regulations; maintaining business continuity; and internal auditing are all common reasons for implementing email archiving services.
Investing in email archiving is a necessity for many organizations, particularly those in regulated industries such as healthcare, legal services, and the government sector. But implementing email archiving can be a challenging process. The average office worker sends and receives over 100 emails every single day – which is a lot of data to store, organize, and filter through in the case of a compliance incident requiring investigation.
Implementing a dedicated email archiving solution makes the process a lot easier. These solutions automatically store immutable copies of all incoming, outbound, and internal email messages, and provide a centralized, searchable dashboard for users to access historical email data.
To help you find the right email archiving solution for your organization, we’ve reviewed the best email archiving solutions available today. In this shortlist we’ll cover the pros and cons, features, and functionality of each solution to help you shortlist the best email archiving solution for your business.
TitanHQ Email Archiving is a comprehensive email archiving solution designed for use with Office 365 that allows users to easily and securely store and search emails. TitanHQ Email Archiving stores all archived emails in an encrypted and tamper-proof archive, ensuring they are protected against data-loss. TitanHQ Email Archiving provides powerful searching and e-Discovery, allowing emails in the archive to be searched in a matter of seconds and retrieved instantly when needed. ArcTitan is a strong archiving solution for organizations, offering automatic back-ups, cloud-based storage and easy data recovery, with cost-effective pricing.
TitanHQ Email Archiving provides full compliance with industry standards, including GDPR. Emails can be easily searched and retrieved, and are fully immutable when stored in the email archive. Pricing is flexible and based on a ‘pay-as-you-go’ model. TitanHQ Email Archiving promises to help organizations save up to 75% on email storage space, reducing the costs and storage on mail servers. TitanHQ Email Archiving is simple to deploy and manage. Admins can configure the system from within the Outlook client, and easily edit retention policies and mailbox quotas. Searching the archive itself is also straightforward, with a search console that makes it easy to locate the right emails on both desktop and mobile.
TitanHQ Email Archiving provides a number of benefits over native archiving within Office 365, including enhanced email search and storage, reduced complexity and reduced time spent on deployment and ongoing management. Customers praise TitanHQ Email Archiving for its speed, scalability, and the fact that the service has no storage limitations, helping to save on archiving costs. This also means that TitanHQ Email Archiving is a strong solution for organizations looking to store large amounts of email, such as schools and universities.
TitanHQ Email Archiving is an easy to manage archiving solution, which we recommend to SMBs, enterprises and MSPs who are looking for comprehensive archiving available both on-premise and in the cloud.
Intradyn offers an all-in-one platform for digital archiving and eDiscovery, covering email, SMS, Microsoft Teams, and social media, with unlimited storage hosted in secure AWS cloud infrastructure. Intradyn supports all major email servers including MS Exchange, Microsoft 365, and Gmail. Intradyn’s email archiving platform can be deployed on-prem, in the cloud, and as a virtual appliance.
Intradyn captures and indexes all email messages in real-time, supporting the sPOP3,sIMAP4, and SMTP ingress protocols. Emails are available in eDiscovery searches seconds after being archived. Retention policies can be customized by user, department, or email domain, with the ability to retain data indefinitely. Archived emails can also be recovered directly to inboxes where required. When onboarding, you can import historic email messages using direct mailbox ingestion, PST, EML, and MBOX file upload.
End users are able to access their own archive if enabled by admins, where they can view and export emails as PDFs. These actions are fully audited. Intradyn supports SAML, MFA, and integrations with Microsoft Entra & Active Directory, openLDAP, Okta and others for managing user access. Administrators have the ability to export emails in PDF, EML, or PST formats for production purposes.
For eDisocvery, Admins can search based on keywords, attachments, proximity, and can schedule and save searches for future reference. Searches support over 100+ languages, including Spanish, Chinese, and French. Admins can also review and redact sensitive email content, automate legal hold retention, and flag specific emails for review with in-built commenting and review tools.
Intradyn offers a comprehensive platform for archiving digital communications, including emails. We recommend Intradyn as an effective solution for organizations based in North America looking to align and ensure compliance with federal, state, and industry regulations.
Libraesva offers a range of products designed to protect organizations against sophisticated email threats and ensure compliance. Their product suite includes a Secure Email Gateway, a security awareness training platform and next-gen email archiving. Libraesva Email Archiver is their archiving solution that protects business critical information against data loss, while simplifying compliance and governance processes.
Libraesva Email Archiver creates copies of all user emails and stores them in a central archive to ensure the security of corporate data in the event of a breach or natural event resulting in data loss. To ensure security and compliance with data protection regulations, Libraesva timestamps each archived email and encrypts it via AES 256-bit encryption, protecting the data store against tampering. Organizations can choose whether to store their archived data on local disks, network disks or in object storage, with full S3 compatibility and support for on-premises virtual appliances. And no matter where data is stored, the Outlook Add-In features enables users to seamlessly access archived emails without having to log in to a separate portal.
Libraesva offers flexible cloud and on-prem deployment options and integrates with all mail servers, including Office 365 and Microsoft Exchange. This enables all organizations to utilize Libraesva’s email archiving platform, no matter their state of cloud migration. We recommend Libraesva Email Archiver to any sized organization looking to implement email archiving for security and compliance, and particularly those that may also wish to utilize Libraesva’s SEG and awareness training platform within their email security stack. We also recommend the solution to MSPs wanting to add email archiving to their product offering, as Libraesva offers native multi-tenant management.
Barracuda is a leading cybersecurity provider covering email, networks, data, and cloud-applications for more than 150,000 organizations worldwide. Barracuda’s Cloud Archiving Service enables teams to archive and retain searchable copies of all emails for as long as needed. Emails are automatically archived, with no storage limits for Microsoft 365 and granular retention policy options.
Barracuda Cloud Archiving provides comprehensive e-Discovery features, with a fully indexed, searchable archive for quickly and easily finding email messages. Emails can be searched, filtered, and tagged for ease-of-use. The archive is role-based and specific email messages can be placed on legal hold for as long as needed, before being exported to compliance or auding teams.
A key benefit of this solution is that end-users can also view their archived email content at any time, via a M365 plugin. This allows them to view all of their archived data, from whichever device they use – for example, to find details of an order or booking received months previously. The solution is fully cloud-based and easy to deploy.
Barracuda Cloud Archiving is delivered as part of Barracuda’s complete email archiving solution: Barracuda Email Protection. This consolidated security stack combines cloud archiving with a leading email security and inbox protection solution, and cloud-to-cloud backup for Microsoft 365. We’d recommend organizations looking to implement an integrated email protection and email archiving solution for M365 to consider shortlisting Barrcuda’s archiving solution.
Global Relay provides leading archiving, e-Discovery and compliance management solutions for digital communications. Their platform is used by over 20,000 organizations globally, including 22 of the top 25 banks. The Global Relay Archive is a comprehensive all-in-one data archive that integrates with cloud-based email clients, instant messaging solutions, mobile operating systems, social media channels, and web applications to automatically store and archive message data.
Global Relay offers a fully comprehensive data archiving platform. It provides secure archiving for virtually any type of major electronic message, immediately storing an immutable copy of the message and contextual meta-data. Global Relay also provides a comprehensive e-Discovery and legal hold feature; users can quickly find historical data in a clear-easy-to use dashboard that displays key message details at a glance, no matter the original communication platform. Global Relay uses AI systems to reconstruct conversations and provide contextual details on message history.
The platform also integrates with your corporate directory, which enables it to create a dynamic record of organizational structures, and who has access to what data. Global Relay is compliant with SEC, FINRA, IIROC, FCA, SOX, HIPAA, MiFID II, and GDPR, and provides comprehensive audit logging for tracking access to the archive. Each archived item is encrypted with a unique AES key to ensure the security of the stored data.
Global Relay is a strong choice particularly for organizations in regulated industries such as banking, legal services, healthcare, finance, government, and education. The solution provides highly secure, compliant archiving for over 50 communications apps, with rapid e-Discovery and a clear, easy-to-use admin console.
Microsoft Exchange Online Archiving is a cloud-based, enterprise email archiving solution designed to work natively with Microsoft 365. It’s available for certain Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft 365 plans, and for organizations that have deployed Microsoft Exchange Server 2019, 2016, and 2013. As a native Microsoft platform, the service is very easy to deploy, and is an easy add-on to your existing Microsoft 365 plan.
Microsoft offers advanced archiving features for emails sent via M365 and Exchange Online. This includes an “archived” mailbox that appears in the user’s primary mailbox folder within Outlook. Users can access and search this mailbox as easily as they would their non-archived email content. Users can easily restore emails they have deleted from their email content directly from the archive, back into their inbox.
Exchange Online Archiving offers retention policies, legal hold, e-Discovery, encryption, and auditing features for compliance. Admins can configure retention policies for folders, conversations, and individual messages. Individual users and mailbox items can be placed on legal hold, which prevents tampering, and items can be held for an indefinite amount of time. Admins can search a variety of mailbox items, including emails, attachments, contacts, calendar details, and tasks, with filtering capabilities and keyword-based searching. Full administrator audit logging is provided.
Microsoft offers a strong archiving solution, which is an ideal platform for organizations using M365 that require an archiving function, without having the full compliance use-case to need to invest in a third-party solution. The platform is cost-effective, easy-to-manage, and makes it very easy for end-users to access their own email archive within Outlook.
Mimecast is a leading email security and compliance provider, protecting more than 40,000 customers globally with threat protection, security awareness training, and data retention solutions. Mimecast Cloud Archive is a secure, cloud-based archiving solution that ensures compliance and continuity, covering both email data and Microsoft Teams data. Fully integrated into Mimecast’s leading email security platform, the Mimecast Cloud Archive provides a robust central repository for storing email messages.
The Mimecast Cloud Archive is highly scalable, with fast performance and maximized availability and uptime. Mimecast provides comprehensive search tools so that users can quickly find email content and specific data when required, with file recovery tools to help recover data which may have been corrupted or lost. Alongside email content, the platform stores meta-data (including time of sending, location, and device), along with Outlook folders, calendars, and contacts.
The archive is highly secure, reducing the risk of compromise and helping ensure compliance with data protection regulations. Admins can view audits and reports showcasing who has accessed the archive, and when. In addition to email data, Mimecast also archives Microsoft Teams data, including one-to-one, group, and channel conversations. Mimecast also supports proactive scanning for compliance breaches with Microsoft Supervision: a security tool that continuously monitors email communications for potential compliance risks.
Mimecast supports compliance with SEC, FINRA, and HIPAA, and is a strong choice for enterprises looking for a compliant solution, with an easy-to-manage, scalable archive with almost real-time searching functionality. We particularly recommend this solution for organizations currently using, or considering, Mimecast’s powerful email security platform. The solutions are tightly integrated and are a strong option to consider for email security and management.
Proofpoint is the world’s largest email security provider, with annual revenues of over $1bn USD. They secure more than half of the Fortune 100 and the top 5 banks globally with a leading email security service. Proofpoint offers a family of integrated compliance and data archiving solutions, helping enterprise teams to stay compliant and manage information risk. Proofpoint Archive is a cloud-based archiving service that enables legal discovery and end-user archive access.
Proofpoint Archive supports a wide range of data types, including email, social media data, SMS messages, and other enterprise collaboration data. Admins are able to configure and enforce granular policies for different data types to match specific regulations, which are customizable across different geographies. Policies are easy to set up and manage. Data is stored in a secure, searchable archive, which is very easy to use. Search results are returned extremely quickly, with self-service functionality for end-users, and the ability to export data to multiple file formats.
Proofpoint’s dashboard is modern and provides insights and visualization, with key graphs, charts, and dashboards to help compliance teams better manage compliance risks. Proofpoint also enables an automated legal hold process, with full reporting and audit trail. Legal teams can retain data from the archive, even beyond assigned retention periods, and search through content placed on legal hold.
Proofpoint Archive is a comprehensive enterprise archiving tool. It covers email data and goes far beyond just the email channel. The dashboard is highly responsive and easy-to-use, with granular functionality for risk and compliance teams. Proofpoint Archive is also available as a managed service. This is a strong option to consider for large enterprise teams requiring comprehensive archiving and compliance management.
Proofpoint Essentials Email Archive is a comprehensive email archiving platform for SMBs. This solution is delivered as part of Proofpoint’s Essentials package, a multi-layered email security and compliance stack which includes email protection, encryption, archiving and continuity, delivered as a single platform, with a single admin console.
Proofpoint have an unparalleled visibility into email threats with their global threat intelligence platform. Proofpoint collect and analyse more than 100 billion data points a day from more than 100 million email boxes, 200 million social-media accounts, and 7 million mobile apps. Proofpoint secure more than 50% of the Fortune 100, the top 5 banks globally and 7 of the top 10 global retailers.
Proofpoint Essentials Email Archive is highly secure, and offers quick performance when searching through email content, with configurable legal hold and retention policies. Emails are held for up to 10 years, with no limits on storage. End users are able to accesses their own archived emails, but not edit them, on desktop or mobile. In addition, admins can configure a range of retention policies to ensure legal compliance.
Proofpoint Essentials Email Archive is popular with customers for ease of use, and ease of deployment, in particular for O365 users. The service is cost-effective when considering the advanced features on offer. We recommend this service for SMBs and organizations of all sizes, particularly those looking to deploy email archiving alongside a leading inbound email security platform.
Smarsh is a dedicated archiving and compliance management provider that provides archiving solutions for over 100 digital communications channels. Smarsh’s cloud-based archiving solutions are used by regulated organizations of all sizes globally, including the top banks in North America, Europe, and Asia. Smarsh supports the capture and archive of almost all corporate communications data across email, mobile, voice, instant messaging, and the web.
Smarsh supports all popular email platforms and is easily deployed to any service via their journaling platform. Smarsh captures all email content, including attachments, in their native format. Images and documents can be also viewed and downloaded in their original form. The platform categorizes emails based on whether they were sent internally or externally, and whether they were inbound or outbound in relation to the user.
The archive includes a fast search engine, with granular features to help compliance teams quickly find email messages and data. Admins can configure supervision policies to highlight risks and content can be exported from the archive at any time, in multiple file formats. Smarsh also integrates with identity platforms in order to help track profiles across the email archive. End users are able to access their own historical email content, with Smarsh’s Personal Archive feature.
Smarsh delivers a comprehensive suite of compliance, archiving, and risk management solutions, including hosting and encryption. Smarsh is an ideal platform to consider for regulated organizations looking for a one-stop-shop to deploy compliance and risk mitigation services.
Trustifi’s Advanced Cloud Email Archiving is a cloud-based email archiving solution that securely retains all email messages. It enforces 256-bit AES encryption, and provides features like powerful search capabilities, easy export for data, queries and cases, and real-time access monitoring for compliance.
Trustifi’s key features include retention management that allows set periods for email storage before deletion, data redundancy across multiple data centres, and eDiscovery features that can be used by auditing, regulatory, and legal teams. The platform allows for the restoration of deleted emails, as well as the ability to export data across a range of formats.
Trustifi’s platform also provides advanced AI-supported security to protect business emails from sophisticated attacks and ensure compliance with automated Data Loss Prevention (DLP) and 256-bit AES encryption. A standout feature is AI-based account protection, which automatically disables access to compromised accounts. This can all be managed from a streamlined, intuitive interface for non-technical users.
Deployment is straightforward, particularly for M365 users, with a modern, intuitive admin console for viewing reports and configuring policies. Trustifi Advanced Cloud Email Archiving is comprehensive, robust, and intuitive. We recommend the service as an excellent choice for those seeking a comprehensive, unified platform for email security.
Email archiving is the system of storing your email communication so they can later be retrieved, typically for legal and auditing purposes.
Email archiving solutions allow you to store tamper-proof, immutable copies of each and every email your organization sends and receives. Most email archiving solutions capture email content directly from the email client itself, or during transport, so the entire process occurs without any added work for IT teams or end users. These emails are stored separately to your main email client so that if you change company email systems, delete every email in your inbox, or your company network is wiped, you’ll still have copies of all your original emails.
Many email archives today are cloud-based, allowing you to access your stored emails from any device, at any time. They often also include e-discovery features, which allow you to search the archive for specific emails by attributes such as recipient, sender, time, attachment type, and subject.
Once you have found the emails you are looking for, or even if you need to bulk export every email from a particular month for example, archiving solutions make it easy to restore past emails and attachments.
Typically, third-party email archiving solutions work via the process journaling. Email journaling records all communications within the email archiving solution. The journaling system creates copies of all email messages and stores them in a secure, searchable database. This process can be customized based on your organization’s specific journaling and retention policies.
When deploying an email archiving solution to your email environment, for example Microsoft 365, you need to add a journaling rule in the admin center, which tells your email provider (e.g., Microsoft) to send emails to your chosen archiving database. Most email archiving solutions provide an in-depth guide to deployment based on specific steps required.
However, there are many different approaches to email archiving, and the specifics of how email archiving works can differ based on the approach used. Many users will be familiar with the email archiving functionality offered natively within Microsoft Outlook or Google Mail, in which archived emails are sent to a separate Archive folder. But this use case is meant for end-users to manage their emails more effectively, not for IT departments or compliance use cases.
When an end-user archives an email in Outlook or Google Mail, it is removed from their inbox and placed in a separate folder. From there, archived emails can be deleted or moved back to the inbox. Without an additional third-party email archiving solution, this does not ensure archived messages are kept secure and immutable.
When using an enterprise email archiving solution, a copy of every single inbound, outbound, or internal email is stored in a secure repository, where emails can be searched, placed on legal hold, and recovered. Meta-data and attachments can also be viewed.
This repository is usually cloud-based and accessible by admins, auditors, and legal compliance teams. Sometimes the cloud-archive can also be accessed by end-users, who can use the service to search through their own archive and view messages that have been lost or accidentally deleted.
There are several reasons that organizations should archive emails, particularly those in heavily regulated industries such as legal services, healthcare, government, and finance.
Common reasons for implementing email archiving tools include:
Email archiving solutions should be optimized for easy deployment, hands-off management, and fast search and retrieval when required. Key features to look for in an email archiving solution include:
The most common use case for email archiving solutions is to ensure compliance with auditing and data regulation requirements. As such, ensuring the solution you choose enables full legal compliance should be the first and most important feature that you consider.
This should include ensuring that all emails are automatically archived, along with attachments and meta-data that outlines where the email was sent, at what time, and to whom. It should also include details on replies, email chains and forwarding.
Archived emails should also be fully immutable. Nobody should be able to edit or tamper with archived data; this is an important stipulation in many legal regulations.
Compliance also means auditing who has access to the email archive. The best archiving solutions will provide granular permissions management with auditing over when the archive has been accessed.
Another important part of ensuring legal compliance is ensuring the archived data itself has tight security controls. Archived emails should be fully encrypted to ensure malicious threat actors are not able to compromise any sensitive information that may be held in email records.
We recommend looking for a system that protects archived emails when in transit and at rest. Proofpoint recommends that any data centers used to house cloud archived emails should be SSAE-16 SOC 2 Type II certified.
In addition, there should also be strong security controls to govern who has access to the archive. As previously mentioned, look for a solution with granular permissions management for accessing the archive, with comprehensive auditing. We also recommend that any access to the archive is reinforced with comprehensive multi-factor authentication.
Finally, we also recommend looking for a solution that has multiple layers of backup in different file formats. When storing backups of any type of data, you should follow the rule of “3 2 1”: store at least three copies of your data in two different locations, and at least one copy should be in a different format or medium to the others.
This means if one archive is corrupted or lost, you can easily recover data by switching to another backup method. Each one of these should again be secured with high levels of data security.
Arguably the most important feature on this list is the ability for auditors, admins or even end-users to be able to easily search the email archive to find data when needed. It’s great to have a legally compliant platform with excellent data security, but if the platform is impossible to use to actually find and export data when needed, the platform has failed.
So, a key feature to look out for is a well-designed user interface that should be simple to navigate and quick to return search results. A system that takes hours to search through an archive is not scalable for organizations that need to retain data over a period of years.
But as well as being simple to use, a good archiving platform will have comprehensive e-discovery functionality to return the results you actually want to see. You should be able to search on granular pre-defined filters, such as sender, recipient, date, and subject line. You should also be able to easily export particular emails and chains when needed, without having to go through a costly or time-consuming process.
This in and of itself is important also to the compliance use case. If auditors are unable to use an archiving system to find any emails related to a litigation case, for example, then it’s possible you could breach compliance regulations.
In addition, the e-discovery archive should also be available even when your email network is down. This is important in ensuring business continuity, giving users access to their inbox at all times.
There are many ways that email archiving can be deployed across an organization, but for most businesses we recommend looking for a cloud-based email archiving solution.
Most organizations today use cloud-based email platforms such as Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace; cloud-based email archiving solutions can integrate natively with these platforms, speeding up the deployment process and saving businesses valuable time.
In addition, cloud-based archiving can also be more cost effective and reliable, with fewer outages and downtime than legacy on-premises alternatives. Storage costs can also be lower with cloud-based solutions, and cloud-storage is often more scalable.
However, some organizations may be already using an on-premises email archiving solution but looking to move to the cloud. In this case, we recommend looking for a cloud-based provider with low costs for important legacy data, or using a hybrid email archiving approach, choosing a provider that offers both an on-premises and cloud-based solution.
Some organizations may also need file archiving alongside email archiving; in this instance, we recommend looking for an email archiving solution that also offers file and data archiving.
Legal hold is an important factor to consider when choosing an email archiving provider. This is the process of storing emails in anticipation of them being used in a litigation event or audit. It’s important that whichever email archiving solution you choose offers legal hold, covering the period of time you need.
Flexibility more broadly is an important aspect of email archiving. It’s important to choose a flexible service that stores emails for as long as you need them––we recommend a minimum of ten years––but many businesses will need to archive important emails for far longer.
However, over such a period of time, storage costs can become expensive, especially for organizations heavily reliant on email. For this reason, it’s a good idea to look for a service that only stores certain important emails long term, rather than spam messages like newsletters. Less important, external emails may only need to be archived for short periods of time, perhaps 12 months.
The best recommendation we can give for this particular point is to consider all the storage costs associated, along with your organizations’ particular use cases and compliance requirements, and look for a service flexible enough to meet your needs.
The final thing to look for in any archiving solution is the cost of importing and exporting data, and the archiving format. For many organizations email archiving represents a long-term commitment––this is not a solution you are likely to swap out on a regular basis.
For this reason, it’s a good idea to ensure that costs associated for migrating data into the archive, exporting data from the archive, and long-term storage costs are within your organization’s budget.
It’s also a good idea to check that the archiving provider you choose offers an open archiving format, so if for whatever reason you do need to export data into a different system, it’s not locked to a proprietary archiving system or data type.
Exporting data to a competitor’s archiving system can also have hidden costs, so it’s a good idea to thoroughly check the small print on any archiving solution you are considering.
When looking to implement an email archiving solution, organizations must build out a comprehensive strategy, outlining specific requirements such as retention policies and key data compliance regulations to follow. Combining this with the above features will help teams to ensure a successful email archiving deployment.
Joel Witts is the Content Director at Expert Insights, meaning he oversees all articles published and topics covered. He is an experienced journalist and writer, specialising in identity and access management, Zero Trust, cloud business technologies, and cybersecurity. Joel is a co-host of the Expert Insights Podcast and conducts regular interviews with leading B2B tech industry experts, including directors at Microsoft and Google. Joel holds a First Class Honours degree in Journalism from Cardiff University.
Craig MacAlpine is CEO and founder of Expert Insights. Before founding Expert Insights in August 2018, Craig spent 10 years as CEO of EPA cloud, an email security provider acquired by Ziff Davies, formerly J2Global (NASQAQ: ZD) in 2013, which has now been rebranded as VIPRE Email Security. Craig has extensive experience in the email security industry, with 20+ years of experience helping organizations to stay secure with innovative information security and cyber security solutions.