Building A Long-Term Email Archiving Strategy For Compliance

Email archiving is the process of preserving emails in an immutable, structured format. While it can be used to support business continuity in the event of data loss or corruption, it’s most commonly used for auditing, eDiscovery, and compliance. 

If your business is operating in a heavily regulated industry such as government, healthcare, finance, or manufacturing, email archiving can help you meet industry-specific data protection regulations. Even if you sit within a less regulated industry, email archiving can help you comply with data privacy frameworks like GDPR and CCPA and make it easier for you to respond to data subject access requests (DSARs). 

Some popular email clients come with archiving capabilities built in, but these are typically very limited. Microsoft Outlook, for example, enables users to easily archive and search for old emails. However, this feature was designed for individuals—not businesses. It doesn’t allow admins, auditors, or legal teams to carry out company-wide email searches, and it only enables users to apply a very limited set of compliance policies. 

Because of this, we recommend that any organization looking to archive their emails for compliance purposes invests in a robust third-party email archiving solution designed specifically for enterprise use. 

But not all archiving solutions are built the same: some are cloud-based, others are deployed on-prem; some use mailbox-level archiving, others use journaling; some focus on compliance and eDiscovery, others on data loss prevention. 

This can make it tricky to choose the right tool for your business’ needs—but we’re here to help. Here’s how to build an email archiving strategy for compliance—from the specific policies you may need to comply with, to best practices when outlining your archiving strategy, to the top features you should look for when comparing archiving tools. 

Compliance Requirements For Email Archiving

You organization will have to comply with a different combination of data protection and privacy standards depending on your industry, the types of data you handle, your location, and even the location of your customers. Because of this, it’s really important that you look up the specific standards and frameworks relevant to your business and read up on what their requirements are for email archiving. 

But to help you get started, here’s what some of the most common compliance standards mandate when it comes to archiving emails. 

Finance

The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) mandates that financial institutions must retain broker-dealer communications for 3-6 years, while the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Rule 17a-4 mandates a six-year retention period, during the first two years of which the data must be immediately accessible. Both regulations require emails to be stored in Write Once, Read Many (WORM) format to ensure it can’t be modified or deleted, and they both require the archive to be supervised by a compliance officer who makes sure that retention periods align with legal holds during any investigations.  

The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA) mandates that financial organizations retain customer communications for seven years.

The Dodd-Frank Act mandates that you retain certain financial records for 5-7 years. 

Healthcare

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) mandates that healthcare providers and insurers retain emails containing personal health information (PHI) for six years, and they should be able to be retrieved within 30 days for patient requests or audits. All archived emails should be secured with encryption and role-based access controls, and you must keep an audit trail that tracks access to the archive and any modifications that take place within it. 

Publicly Traded Companies

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) mandates that publicly traded companies retain employee communications, financial records, and audit trails for seven years after the relevant event (e.g., employment termination). You must store emails in a non-rewritable format, and use third-party auditing to ensure the integrity of any audits carried out. 

Other Regulations

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) mandates that any organization handling the data of EU citizens retains data only for as long as necessary. It also requires you to be able to permanently delete personal data from your archive if any individual requests the erasure of their personal data. 

In America, the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) mandate that all organizations retain electronically stored information for potential litigation. 

How To Build An Email Archiving Strategy: Best Practices

Once you’ve identified which compliance requirements you need to adhere to, you can start putting together your email archiving strategy. Following these best practices will help you build a strategy that balances security, operational efficiency, and legal defensibility. 

1. Set retention policies: Define retention period based on the most stringent requirement your business must adhere to. Remember, if you need to store different types of data for different periods, you’ll need to look for an archiving solution that will allow you to do that—usually, this will mean finding one that’s focused on eDiscovery. 
2. Plan for legal hold: In the event of litigation, you need to be able to prevent relevant emails from being deleted, even if they’ve reached the end of their retention period. You can do this by placing them in legal hold, which temporarily suspends your retention policies until the legal matter is resolved. 
3. Implement a WORM model: Most compliance standard require you to store your emails in a tamper-proof format, so that they can’t be altered or deleted before the end of the retention period. Using immutable storage and keeping chain=of-custody logs for each email can help you comply with this. 
4. Automate capture within the inbox: Relying on users to move emails can create compliance gaps; instead, you should archive all inbound, outbound, and internal messages automatically at the source, including their attachments and metadata. 
5. Store your emails securely: You should use TLS encryption to secure your emails in transit, and AES-256 to secure them during storage. You should also use multi-factor authentication and role-based access controls to ensure only authenticated, authorized users can access archived emails, and keep audit logs for all access and retrieval events. 
6. Backup your archive: Maintain a geographically isolated backup of your email archive to maintain continuity should your primary systems fail, and mitigate risks like provider outages, sync errors, accidental deletion, and ransomware attacks. 
7. Prioritize indexing and search capabilities: To help you retrieve emails quickly (e.g., in the event of litigation or a DSAR), your archive should be full-text indexed and each message should be tagged/categorized according to the type of data it contains and which compliance standard it’s relevant to. It should also support complex search queries, Boolean operators, and search filters (e.g., date range).
8. Train your employees: Make sure your IT, compliance, and legal teams all know their responsibilities when it comes to what data is archived, retention policies, and legal hold processes, so that they can coordinate effectively on policy enforcement. 
9. Test recovery and retrieval: It’s no good spending time and effort building an email archiving strategy if it doesn’t work—so you need to test it! Periodically make sure you can retrieve archived emails within a required timeframe, and document your retrieval procedures for audits. 
10. Review and update your strategy: Regulations change. To make sure you’re not under- or over-retaining data (and therefore violating compliance or over-spending on archiving), perform internal audits and review your archiving strategy annually. 

How To Choose An Email Archiving Solution

There are several important things to consider when you’re ready to choose your email archiving solution 

• Whether you want an on-premises or cloud-based tool
• What type of archiving method you want it to use
• Whether the feature set will support your business’ compliance needs

Let’s take a look at each of these in a little more detail. 

On-Prem Vs. Cloud Email Archiving

Traditionally, email archives were stored on-premises on magnetic tape or other low-cost media. On-prem storage allows organizations to have full ownership and control over their data, which can be particularly useful if you need to comply with strict data residency regulations. But while you have full ownership of your data, you also have full ownership of your archiving infrastructure, and are responsible for keeping backups or archives operational.

Cloud-based archiving solutions involve a third-party SaaS vendor maintaining the archive for you for a monthly or annual subscription. They’re becoming increasingly popular for providing scalability, ease of use, lower infrastructure requirements, and lower storage costs. It’s also often much easier to quicker to retrieve data from a cloud-based archive than an on-premises one in the event of an audit or litigation, and most email archiving providers also offer in-built security functionality to protect your data against tampering and corruption. 

If the benefits of cloud-based archiving are appealing to you but you need on-prem storage to comply with certain regulations, you could also take a hybrid approach, e.g.:

• Keep immutable copies of your data on-prem, whilst mirroring them to a compliant cloud service
• Keep new or recent data in an existing archive and offload old data to the cloud
• Keep highly sensitive data on-prem and offload less sensitive data to the cloud

Email Archiving Methods

There are three main archiving methods that any prospective solutions might offer.

Mailbox-level archiving allows you to archive the data of specific users or departments with sensitive communications. It gives you granular control over what data is archived, reducing storage costs while prioritizing the retention of sensitive data. However, without the right level of management and oversight, it can lead to the creation of inconsistent policies which, in turn, makes it difficult to achieve compliance. 

Personal storage table (PST-based) archiving enables users to manually archive their own emails locally. It’s straightforward, but the lack of centralized storage makes eDiscovery processes more difficult. Plus, because PSTs are stored on each user’s endpoint, they’re more susceptible to data loss caused by theft or ransomware. 

Journalling is an archiving method that creates an archive called a “journal mailbox” within your email server. You then set up rules that tell the solution which emails to archive (e.g., all emails, only emails from specific departments or users, only emails to/from external contacts). The solution then forwards copies of these emails to the journal mailbox in real time—or, if it’s cloud-based, it uses APIs to ingest email data directly—, indexes them, and stores them securely. Many journal-based solutions also offer eDiscovery tools that make it easier to locate and retrieve specific messages. However, these solutions typically require significant storage capacity. 

Top Email Archiving Features 

Once you’ve created your archiving strategy and decided what type of archive you want to implement, you’re ready to start shopping for a solution. But there are a lot of different email archiving tools on the market, each with a different set of features tailored to specific use cases. 

To help you find the right tool for your business, here are the most important features to look for when choosing an email archiving solution to help you meet compliance needs:

1. Automatic policy enforcement: You should be able to configure rules that tell the solution how and when to automatically capture copies of emails, index them, enforce retention periods, and permanently delete them from the archive. 
2. Customizable retention periods: You should be able to specify different retention periods for different types of data, and the solution should automatically and permanently delete archived data once its retention period runs out. 
3. Legal hold: You should be able to apply legal holds to prevent certain data from being deleted even once its retention period has expired. 
4. Granular search capabilities: You should be able to easily search for and retrieve emails for audit and litigation purposes. The best solutions offer a combination of metadata filters (e.g., data range), Boolean logic, and granular keyword search. 
5. Secure email storage: The solution should encrypt your emails in transit and at rest (we recommend TLS and AES-256 respectively). It should store them in an immutable WORM format, and the data centers used to house the archive should be SSAE-16 and SOC 2 Type II certified. 
6. Role-based access controls: You should be able to configure policies that define which users can access which data within the archive, based on their role within your company. 
7. Audit logging: The solution should create an audit trail of all activity that occurs within the archive, including access attempts and policy changes. These logs should be timestamped and immutable.

Summary

For many organizations today, email archiving isn’t just a best practice—it’s a critical part of a strong compliance strategy. By understanding the specific requirements of your industry, building a well-structured archiving strategy, and investing in the right solution, your organization can reduce compliance risk and safeguard critical data against loss or tampering. 

Whether you choose a cloud, on-prem, or hybrid deployment, and whether you choose a modern journalling approach or a more traditional archiving method, implementing a secure email archive can not only help you meet your compliance goals, but support long-term business continuity. 

Discover More

Here are some more articles that may interest you: 

• Top Email Archiving Solutions For Business 
• Top Email Archiving Solutions For Microsoft 365 
• Top 11 eDiscovery Software Solutions
• Email Archiving Buyers’ Guide 2025
• Why Is Email Archiving Important? 5 Key Benefits Of Email Archiving 
• What Is The Best Way To Store Emails Long-Term? Strategies And Solutions

Not quite what you’re looking for? You can find all our resources on email archiving in our Archiving Software Hub.