What Is Email Archiving?

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.

How Does Email Archiving Work?

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.

Where Do Archived Emails Go?

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.

Why Should You Archive Emails?

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: Regulatory Compliance: Many industries must keep copies of internal and external correspondence to demonstrate compliance with regulations governing corporate communications and data protection. Email archiving ensures that email content cannot be deleted, corrupted, or tampered with – accidentally or intentionally. This minimizes the risk of fines for breach of compliance regulations. e-Discovery: In the case of an investigation, either internally or externally, it’s important for auditors to be able to quickly find content associated with particular employees or groups. This can be difficult with the native functionality offered by many email systems. Email archiving provides comprehensive e-Discovery functionality, enabling teams to quickly search, filter, and export email content going back several years. Internal Audits: Internal auditing and investigations are critical process for HR, risk, and compliance teams. Auditors need an easy way to search email content in the case of a workplace investigation, with transparent auditing to ensure that data is being accessed in a compliant way. Email archiving provides the functionality on both counts, allowing teams to find email content, and highlighting who has accessed email data. Business Continuity: Human error, tech unreliability, cyberthreats, and natural disasters can all upend careful planning and lead to data loss, which can be hugely damaging to business processes and continuity. Nobody wants to suddenly find they have lost hundreds of emails and contacts. A secure, centralized archive held on a third-party system can help to ensure you always have a backup available in case of disaster.

The Top 11 Email Archiving Solutions For Business

TitanHQ Email Archiving

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Intradyn

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Libraesva Email Archiver

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Barracuda Cloud Archive

Barracuda, a global cybersecurity leader, protects over 150,000 organizations across email, networks, data, and cloud applications. Its Cloud Archiving Service, part of Barracuda Email Protection, provides unlimited, searchable email archiving for Microsoft 365 with granular retention and robust e-Discovery, ensuring compliance and accessibility.

Why We Picked Barracuda Cloud Archiving: We rate Barracuda Cloud Archiving highly for its seamless Microsoft 365 integration, unlimited storage, and user-friendly e-Discovery, ideal for organizations seeking a comprehensive email protection and archiving solution.

Barracuda Cloud Archiving Best Features: Key features include automatic email archiving with no storage limits and customizable retention policies for Microsoft 365. The fully indexed, searchable archive supports advanced e-Discovery with filtering, tagging, and legal hold capabilities. Role-based access ensures secure management, and emails can be exported for compliance or audits. End-users can access archives via a Microsoft 365 plugin on any device. The cloud-based solution is easy to deploy and integrates with Barracuda’s email security and cloud-to-cloud backup.

What’s Great:

Unlimited storage with granular retention for Microsoft 365
Advanced e-Discovery with search, filtering, and legal hold
End-user archive access via Microsoft 365 plugin
Easy cloud-based deployment
Integrated with Barracuda’s email security and backup solutions

Pricing: Pricing is available upon request via Barracuda’s sales team, tailored to organizational needs and Microsoft 365 integration. Contact Barracuda for quotes or trial details.

Who it’s for: Barracuda Cloud Archiving is ideal for organizations of all sizes, particularly those using Microsoft 365, seeking an integrated email archiving and protection solution with robust e-Discovery and compliance features.

Global Relay

Global Relay, a trusted leader in archiving and compliance, serves over 20,000 organizations, including 22 of the top 25 global banks. Its Global Relay Archive is a comprehensive platform for archiving digital communications, integrating with cloud-based email, instant messaging, mobile, social media, and web applications to deliver secure, compliant storage and advanced e-Discovery.

Why We Picked Global Relay Archive: We rate Global Relay Archive highly for its extensive compliance support and AI-driven e-Discovery, offering unmatched security and usability for regulated industries.

Global Relay Archive Best Features: Key features include automatic, immutable archiving of electronic messages with contextual metadata across 50+ communication platforms. The platform uses AI to reconstruct conversations and provide detailed message history. A user-friendly dashboard enables rapid e-Discovery and legal hold, displaying key details instantly. It integrates with corporate directories to track organizational structures and access rights. Data is secured with unique AES encryption per item and complies with SEC, FINRA, IIROC, FCA, SOX, HIPAA, MiFID II, and GDPR, with comprehensive audit logging.

What’s Great:

Archives 50+ communication apps with immutable storage
AI-driven e-Discovery with conversation reconstruction
Compliant with SEC, FINRA, HIPAA, GDPR, and more
Unique AES encryption per archived item
Dynamic corporate directory integration for access control

Pricing: Pricing is available upon request via Global Relay’s sales team, tailored to organizational needs and communication platforms. Contact Global Relay for quotes or trial details.

Who it’s for: Global Relay Archive is ideal for organizations in regulated industries like banking, legal services, healthcare, finance, government, and education, seeking secure, compliant archiving with advanced e-Discovery capabilities.

Microsoft Exchange Online Archiving

Microsoft Exchange Online Archiving is a cloud-based email archiving solution seamlessly integrated with Microsoft 365 and Exchange Server (2019, 2016, 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.

Why We Picked Microsoft Exchange Online Archiving: We rate Exchange Online Archiving highly for its native Microsoft 365 integration and user-friendly access, providing a cost-effective archiving solution for organizations already in the Microsoft ecosystem.

Microsoft Exchange Online Archiving Best Features: Key features include an “archived” mailbox accessible within Outlook, allowing users to search and restore deleted emails directly to their inbox. The platform supports customizable retention policies for folders, conversations, and messages, with legal hold capabilities for indefinite retention. Advanced e-Discovery enables admins to search emails, attachments, contacts, calendar items, and tasks using keywords and filters. Full audit logging ensures compliance, with encryption for data security. Deployment is straightforward as a native Microsoft service.

What’s Great:

Native Outlook integration for seamless user access
Customizable retention policies and indefinite legal hold
Advanced e-Discovery with keyword and filter-based search
Full audit logging and encryption for compliance
Easy deployment within Microsoft 365 plans

Pricing: Pricing is included in select Microsoft 365 and Exchange plans or available as an add-on. Contact Microsoft for specific pricing, tailored to your plan and organizational needs.

Who it’s for: Microsoft Exchange Online Archiving is ideal for organizations using Microsoft 365 or Exchange Server seeking a cost-effective, easy-to-manage email archiving solution with robust compliance features, without requiring a third-party platform.

Mimecast Cloud Archive

Mimecast, a global leader in email security and compliance, protects over 40,000 organizations with solutions for threat protection, security awareness, and data retention. Mimecast Cloud Archive, a secure, cloud-based platform, provides scalable email and Microsoft Teams archiving, tightly integrated with Mimecast’s email security suite, ensuring compliance and data continuity.

Why We Picked Mimecast Cloud Archive: We rate Mimecast Cloud Archive highly for its scalable, secure archiving and near real-time search, offering seamless integration with Mimecast’s email security for comprehensive compliance.

Mimecast Cloud Archive Best Features: Key features include a centralized, encrypted repository for email and Microsoft Teams data, including one-to-one, group, and channel conversations. The platform archives emails, metadata (e.g., send time, location, device), Outlook folders, calendars, and contacts, with unlimited storage. Advanced search tools enable rapid data retrieval, supported by file recovery for corrupted or lost data. Proactive compliance scanning via Microsoft Supervision monitors for risks. Admins access audit logs and reports for tracking. The solution complies with SEC, FINRA, and HIPAA, with high availability and performance.

What’s Great:

Scalable archiving for email and Microsoft Teams data
Near real-time search with advanced e-Discovery tools
SEC, FINRA, HIPAA compliance with proactive scanning
Encrypted storage with audit logging and reports
Tight integration with Mimecast’s email security platform

Pricing: Pricing is available upon request via Mimecast’s sales team, tailored to organizational needs and integration with Mimecast services. Contact Mimecast for quotes or trial details.

Who it’s for: Mimecast Cloud Archive is ideal for enterprises, particularly those using or considering Mimecast’s email security platform, seeking a compliant, scalable archiving solution for email and Microsoft Teams with robust e-Discovery and compliance monitoring.

Proofpoint Archive

Proofpoint, the world’s largest email security provider, generates over $1 billion in annual revenue and protects over half of the Fortune 100 and the top five global banks. Proofpoint Archive, a cloud-based solution within its compliance suite, offers secure, searchable archiving for email, social media, SMS, and enterprise collaboration data, with advanced e-Discovery and compliance management.

Why We Picked Proofpoint Archive: We rate Proofpoint Archive highly for its comprehensive data coverage, responsive dashboard, and granular compliance policies, making it a top choice for enterprises managing complex regulatory needs.

Proofpoint Archive Best Features: Key features include support for archiving email, social media, SMS, and collaboration data, with customizable, geography-specific retention policies. The secure, searchable archive delivers rapid results, with self-service access for end-users and exports to multiple formats. A modern dashboard provides insights through graphs, charts, and compliance-focused visualizations. Automated legal hold with full audit trails allows retention beyond standard policies. The solution is available as a managed service and integrates with Proofpoint’s email security platform.

What’s Great:

Archives email, social media, SMS, and collaboration data
Granular, geography-specific retention policies
Fast, user-friendly search with self-service access
Modern dashboard with compliance visualizations
Automated legal hold with audit reporting

Pricing: Pricing is available upon request via Proofpoint’s sales team, tailored to data types, scale, and managed service options. Contact Proofpoint for quotes or trial details.

Who it’s for: Proofpoint Archive is ideal for large enterprises, particularly in regulated sectors like finance and banking, seeking comprehensive, compliant archiving across multiple data types with advanced e-Discovery and managed service options.

Proofpoint Essentials Email Archive

Proofpoint, a global email security leader, protects over 50% of the Fortune 100, top global banks, and retailers, analyzing billions of data points daily. Proofpoint Essentials Email Archive, part of the Essentials package, delivers secure, cloud-based email archiving within a unified platform that includes email protection, encryption, and continuity, tailored for SMBs.

Why We Picked Proofpoint Essentials Email Archive: Essentials Email Archive is a great option for easy-to-use email archiving with effective compliance features, and seamless integration with Office 365.

Proofpoint Essentials Email Archive Best Features: Key features include secure, unlimited email storage with up to 10-year retention and configurable legal hold policies. The platform offers fast, user-friendly search capabilities for archived emails, accessible by end-users (view-only) on desktop or mobile. Admins manage retention policies via a single console to ensure compliance. Integrated with Proofpoint’s global threat intelligence, it leverages data from over 100 million mailboxes for enhanced security. The solution is easy to deploy, particularly for Office 365 users, and supports the broader Essentials security stack.

What’s Great:

Unlimited storage with up to 10-year retention
Fast, user-friendly email search for end-users
Configurable legal hold and compliance policies
Easy deployment, especially for Office 365
Unified with Proofpoint’s email security and continuity

Pricing: Pricing is available upon request via Proofpoint’s sales team, tailored to organizational size and Essentials package features. Contact Proofpoint for quotes or trial details.

Who it’s for: Proofpoint Essentials Email Archive is ideal for SMBs with under 1,000 users, particularly Office 365 users. It’s a cost-effective, easy-to-deploy email archiving solution delivered alongside advanced email security and compliance features.

10.

Smarsh

Smarsh, a leading archiving and compliance provider, supports over 100 digital communication channels for regulated organizations worldwide, including top banks across North America, Europe, and Asia. Its cloud-based archiving platform captures and stores email, mobile, voice, instant messaging, and web data, delivering robust compliance and risk management.

Why We Picked Smarsh Archive: We rate Smarsh Archive highly for its comprehensive capture of diverse communication channels and fast, granular search, making it a top choice for regulated organizations seeking compliance and risk mitigation.

Smarsh Archive Best Features: Key features include capturing email content and attachments in native formats, with support for all major email platforms via a journaling platform. The archive categorizes emails as internal/external and inbound/outbound, preserving images and documents for viewing or downloading. A fast search engine with granular filters aids compliance teams, and content can be exported in multiple formats. End-users access historical emails via the Personal Archive feature. The platform integrates with identity platforms for profile tracking, offers supervision policies for risk detection, and includes hosting and encryption for security.

What’s Great:

Archives email, mobile, voice, IM, and web data
Fast, granular search with export to multiple formats
Native format preservation for emails and attachments
Personal Archive for end-user access
Compliance with supervision policies and identity integration

Pricing: Pricing is available upon request via Smarsh’s sales team, tailored to organizational needs and communication channels. Contact Smarsh for quotes or trial details.

Who it’s for: Smarsh Archive is ideal for regulated organizations of all sizes, especially in banking and finance, seeking a comprehensive, compliant archiving solution for email and other digital communications with advanced search and risk management.

11.

Trustifi Cloud Email Archive

Trustifi Advanced Cloud Email Archiving is a cloud-based solution that securely stores all email messages with robust compliance and eDiscovery features. Integrated with Trustifi’s AI-powered email security, it provides a unified platform for protection and archiving, ideal for businesses seeking comprehensive email management.

Why We Picked Trustifi Advanced Cloud Email Archiving: We rate Trustifi Advanced Cloud Email Archiving highly for its AI-driven security, intuitive interface, and powerful eDiscovery, offering a seamless, compliant archiving solution for Microsoft 365 users.

Trustifi Advanced Cloud Email Archiving Best Features: Key features include secure email storage with 256-bit AES encryption and data redundancy across multiple data centers. The platform offers customizable retention policies, real-time access monitoring, and advanced eDiscovery for auditing and legal needs. Users can restore deleted emails and export data in multiple formats. AI-supported security includes automated Data Loss Prevention (DLP) and account protection that disables compromised accounts. The intuitive admin console simplifies policy configuration and reporting, with easy deployment for Microsoft 365.

What’s Great:

256-bit AES encryption with multi-data-center redundancy
AI-driven DLP and account protection
Powerful eDiscovery with flexible data export
Customizable retention and real-time monitoring
Easy Microsoft 365 deployment with intuitive console

Pricing: Pricing is available upon request via Trustifi’s sales team, tailored to organizational needs and Microsoft 365 integration. Contact Trustifi for quotes or trial details.

Who it’s for: Trustifi Advanced Cloud Email Archiving is ideal for organizations of all sizes, especially Microsoft 365 users, seeking a secure, compliant email archiving solution with integrated AI-powered security and user-friendly management.

Other Archiving Software Services

MailStore Server (OpenText)

On-premises and cloud archiving with simple management and eDiscovery.

Google Vault

Google Workspace integrated archiving with retention and legal hold.

GFI Archiver

Email archiving with granular search and retention policy controls.

CompleyKEY MailMeter

Scalable email archiving with advanced analytics and compliance.

The Top 11 Email Archiving Solutions For Business

How to Choose the Right Email Archiving Solution?

Selecting the right email archiving solution involves aligning the platform with your organization’s email volume, compliance requirements, and operational needs. Consider these key steps to make an informed choice:

Assess Your Email Environment: Evaluate your email platform (e.g., Microsoft 365, Google Workspace), data volume, and retention needs to ensure compatibility and adequate storage capacity.
Define Compliance and Recovery Goals: Identify regulatory standards (e.g., GDPR, HIPAA, SOX) and recovery objectives (e.g., rapid eDiscovery for audits) to meet legal and business continuity requirements.
Prioritize Scalability: Choose a solution that supports your current email load and can scale to handle increased users, data, or additional communication channels like Microsoft Teams.

Focus on critical features to ensure robust archiving and accessibility:

Comprehensive Archiving: Look for solutions that capture all emails, attachments, and metadata (e.g., ArcTitan, Libraesva) with journaling to ensure no messages are missed, supporting compliance and audits.
Advanced Search and eDiscovery: Prioritize platforms with full-text search, attachment indexing, and rapid retrieval (e.g., Mimecast’s intuitive search) to streamline investigations and legal requests.
Security and Data Integrity: Ensure AES 256-bit encryption, tamper-proof storage, and audit trails (e.g., Libraesva’s timestamping) to protect data and meet regulatory frameworks.
Flexible Deployment Options: Verify support for cloud, on-premises, or hybrid setups (e.g., Intradyn’s AWS-hosted storage) to match your infrastructure and compliance needs.

Balance functionality with usability to maximize adoption and efficiency:

User-Friendly Interface: Avoid complex platforms that slow down IT teams, opting for intuitive dashboards and self-service retrieval to simplify management and user access.
Vendor Support Quality: Select providers with responsive support, detailed documentation, and resources like training or forums to assist with setup and troubleshooting.
Testing and Trials: Use demos, free trials (e.g., offered by TitanHQ or ManageEngine), or independent user reviews to validate performance, search speed, and fit before committing.

Summary and Key Takeaways

Our guide to the leading email archiving solutions provides a comprehensive overview of platforms designed to securely store, manage, and retrieve business emails for compliance, audits, and continuity. The article evaluates tools based on features like comprehensive archiving, advanced eDiscovery, robust security, and flexible deployment, catering to organizations of all sizes. It emphasizes balancing scalability, usability, and compliance to protect critical email data, reduce server load, and streamline legal or regulatory processes in a data-heavy business environment.

Key Takeaways:

Robust Data Protection: Top solutions archive all emails with encryption and tamper-proof storage to ensure compliance with regulations like GDPR or HIPAA.
Efficient Retrieval: Choose platforms with fast, full-text search and eDiscovery tools to quickly access emails and attachments for audits or investigations.
Scalable and Flexible: Prioritize tools that scale with your email volume and offer cloud, on-premises, or hybrid options to fit your infrastructure.

What Do You Think?

We’ve explored the leading email archiving solutions, highlighting how these tools help businesses secure email data, ensure compliance, and simplify eDiscovery. Now, we’d love to hear your perspective—what’s your experience with email archiving platforms? Are features like advanced search, encryption, or Microsoft 365 integration critical for your organization’s data management strategy?

Selecting the right email archiving solution can transform how you manage compliance and data retention, but challenges like deployment complexity or search performance can arise. Have you found a standout platform that’s streamlined your archiving processes, or encountered hurdles with scalability or usability? Share your insights to help other organizations navigate the email archiving landscape and choose the best tool for their needs.

Let us know which solution you recommend to help us improve our list!

FAQs

Everything You Need To Know About Email Archiving (FAQs)

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:

Regulatory Compliance: Many industries must keep copies of internal and external correspondence to demonstrate compliance with regulations governing corporate communications and data protection. Email archiving ensures that email content cannot be deleted, corrupted, or tampered with – accidentally or intentionally. This minimizes the risk of fines for breach of compliance regulations.
e-Discovery: In the case of an investigation, either internally or externally, it’s important for auditors to be able to quickly find content associated with particular employees or groups. This can be difficult with the native functionality offered by many email systems. Email archiving provides comprehensive e-Discovery functionality, enabling teams to quickly search, filter, and export email content going back several years.

Internal Audits: Internal auditing and investigations are critical process for HR, risk, and compliance teams. Auditors need an easy way to search email content in the case of a workplace investigation, with transparent auditing to ensure that data is being accessed in a compliant way. Email archiving provides the functionality on both counts, allowing teams to find email content, and highlighting who has accessed email data.
Business Continuity: Human error, tech unreliability, cyberthreats, and natural disasters can all upend careful planning and lead to data loss, which can be hugely damaging to business processes and continuity. Nobody wants to suddenly find they have lost hundreds of emails and contacts. A secure, centralized archive held on a third-party system can help to ensure you always have a backup available in case of disaster.

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:

Ensure Legal Compliance

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.

Data Security

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.

Strong E-Discovery Performance

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.

Cloud-Based Archiving

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.

Flexibility And Legal Hold

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.

Cost And Open Archiving Format

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.

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Email Archiving Buyers’ Guide 2025

How to choose the right email archiving solution.

Caitlin Harris, Tom King Last updated on May 21, 2025

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Written By

Joel Witts

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.

Technical Review

Craig MacAlpine CEO and Founder

Craig MacAlpine is CEO and Founder of Expert Insights. Before founding Expert Insights in August 2018, Craig spent 10 years as CEO and founder of EPA Cloud, an email security provider that rebranded as VIPRE Email Security following its acquisition by Ziff Davies, formerly J2Global (NASQAQ: ZD) in 2013. Craig is a passionate security innovator with over 20 years of experience helping organizations to stay secure with cutting-edge information security and cybersecurity solutions. Using his extensive experience in the email security industry, he founded Expert Insights with the singular goal of helping IT professionals and CISOs to cut through the noise and find the right cybersecurity solutions they need to protect their organizations.

The Top 11 Email Archiving Solutions For Business

We have shortlisted the best email archiving solutions for business, comparing key features such as e-discovery, retention, and disaster recovery.