State of the market: Email archiving solutions enable you to securely store, index, and retrieve immutable copies of email messages (including metadata and attachments) long-term. They’re typically used for compliance, auditing, and eDiscovery, but can also be used to ensure continuity in the event a user loses their email data.
- The global email archiving software market was valued at USD 2.19 billion in 2023, and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 9.2% to reach a value of USD 4.66 billion by 2031.
- Growth is being driven primarily by an increasing need to archive emails to meet strict regulatory compliance requirements.
- Archiving emails manually can be incredibly time consuming and challenging, particularly when an organization is handling large volumes of emails and needs to implement strict data retention rules.
- A dedicated email archiving solution can fully automate this process, whilst ensuring the integrity, security, and availability of archived emails.
- Technological advancements in cloud storage and search are also driving market expansion, as archiving tools become easier to use, deliver quicker and more accurate search results, and offer more affordable storage options.
Why trust us: We’ve researched, demoed, and tested several leading email archiving solutions, spoken to organizations of all sizes about their archiving challenges and the features that are most useful to them, and interviewed executives from leading providers in the archiving and compliance spaces.
You can find our product reviews, interviews, and Top 10 shortlists to the best email archiving products on the market in our Archiving Software Hub.
Our recommendations: Before we jump into the details, here are our top tips on how to get the most out of your email archiving implementation:
- For highly regulated organizations: Prioritize compliance. That means familiarizing yourself with the compliance requirements you have to adhere to and choosing a solution that will make it easy for you to achieve compliance (e.g., data categorization, DSAR support, the ability to set multiple retention periods).
- For business continuity (and a reduced workload!): Start archiving as soon as you’ve implemented the solution so that you don’t risk any data falling through the cracks. Plus, this will minimize the backlog of data that you’ll need to manually upload to the archive.
- For growing organizations: Choose a solution that can support vast amounts of data and offers compression and deduplication. If you’re using on-prem storage, make sure you’re prepared for lots of storage usage.
How email archiving solutions work: Email archiving solutions can be deployed in the cloud, on-premises, or hybrid, depending on your environment. For example, if you’re using Exchange, you’ll likely use an on-premises archiving tool; if you’re using Microsoft 365, you’ll use a cloud-based tool. That being said, due to their cost-effectiveness, scalability, and flexibility, cloud-based solutions are becoming increasingly popular.
Once deployed, email archiving solutions use a process called journaling to capture and store copies of email communications. To do this, they create a journal mailbox (i.e., the archive) within your email server. You then set up journalling rules that define which emails you want the solution to archive (all emails, only emails involving specific departments, only emails to or from external contacts, etc.).
Once you’ve set up these rules, the archiving solution starts generating copies of all emails that you’ve told it to and forwards those copies to the journal mailbox in real time. Cloud-based solutions also use APIs to ingest email data directly. Once they’re in the archive, the solution extracts metadata (e.g., sender, recipient, timestamps) and content (email body, attachments, embedded links) and indexes the emails, making it easier for you to search the archive and retrieve specific messages.
You can then use the solution’s search tool to find and retrieve emails. These typically include Boolean logic, keyword filters, and metadata tags, but some more advanced tools also offer keyword search.
Beyond journalling configuration, most archiving tools also allow you to set up security and compliance policies, which include controls for things like encryption, access controls, and retention policies. These controls help protect your archived data against unauthorized access and tampering.
Benefits of email archiving: There are three main benefits to implementing an email archiving solution:
- Ensure compliance with data protection frameworks.
- If you’re operating in an industry such as healthcare, manufacturing, infrastructure, finance, or government, an email archiving tool can help you meet the strict, industry-specific data protection regulations with which you have to comply (e.g., HIPAA, SEC, and FINRA).
- Even organizations in less heavily regulated industries need to comply with frameworks such as GDPR or CCPA, and an email archiving tool can help you do this, e.g., by making it easy for you to respond to Data Subject Access Requests (DSARs).
- Streamline legal discovery and auditing processes.
- Email archiving solutions provide untampered, time and date stamped evidence that can assist with legal investigations. The best solutions offer eDiscovery features that make it easy to locate specific emails and allow you to easily export emails to third parties if needed.
- Many email archiving tools also provide audit logs that show who has previously accessed the archive and what actions they carried out. These not only support your internal audits, but can also help you work more effectively with regulatory bodies should the need arise.
- Ensure business continuity.
- While they don’t offer the granular restoration capabilities of a dedicated backup and recovery solution, you can use email archiving tools to locate and restore emails that may have been lost (either accidentally or maliciously).
- Plus, end users can use an email archive to access their emails should your email network go down.
- “I often use the analogy of house insurance. You don’t need house insurance. But most people have it, not because they want their house to burn down, but because, if it does, they want to be able to recover quickly from that incident.” – Mark Mulcahy, Waterford Technologies
Common email archiving challenges: There are a few common challenges that you might come across when implementing an email archiving solution. Here’s what they are and how to overcome them:
- As archiving solutions capture all the emails within your environment, their storage requirements gradually increase and can become very high—and costly. We recommend finding a solution that compresses emails and attachments to save on storage requirements, and uses deduplication to ensure only one copy of each email is archived. We also recommend that you define specific retention periods for different types of emails to ensure they’re only stored for the required amount of time (as opposed to indefinitely).
- If a cybercriminal breaches your archiving solution, they’ll be able to access your company’s entire communication history. To prevent this, make sure you utilize all the security features your solution offers (e.g., encryption, multi-factor authentication integration), and apply role-based access controls (RBAC) to the data stored within your archive to limit the amount of damage a successful attack could cause.
- Many modern email archiving tools are cloud-based and, if you already have an on-premises archive, it can be challenging to migrate your existing data to the new solution. If this sounds like you, we recommend finding a tool that offers migration support from on-prem environments, or a managed archiving service that will take care of the implementation and migration for you.
- “We provide our solution as a managed service. Our team becomes part of your team and—together with the software—we are going to get you a proper, efficient implementation so that you get your ROI.” – Mark Mulcahy, Waterford Technologies
Best email archiving providers: Our team of software analysts and researchers have put together a shortlist of the best providers of email archiving solutions, as well as adjacent lists covering similar topics:
- The Top 11 Email Archiving Solutions For Business
- The Top 11 Email Archiving Solutions For Microsoft 365
- The Top 10 Enterprise Information Archiving Software
- The Top 11 Backup And File Archiving Solutions For SMBs
- The Top 11 eDiscovery Software Solutions
Features checklist: When comparing email archiving solutions, Expert Insights recommends looking for the following features:
- Automatic policy enforcement: The solution should automatically capture and index emails, enforce retention periods, and delete emails based on pre-defined rules.
- Secure email storage: Email security provider Proofpoint recommends that, if you’re using a cloud archive, it should be SSAE-16 SOC 2 Type II certified. The solution should encrypt your emails in transit and at rest, and all archived copies should be immutable. It may also use Write Once Read Many (WORM) to ensure the integrity of your data.
- Access controls: You should be able to configure policies that define which users can access which data within the archive.
- Storage optimization: The solution should use deduplication and compression techniques to optimize storage space.
- Customizable retention periods: You should be able to specify custom retention policies for different types of data, and the solution should automatically delete data once the retention limit is met. This is particularly important if you’re operating in a highly regulated industry, and/or you’re going to be archiving vast amounts of data.
- Granular search tools: You should be able to easily search for and retrieve emails in your archive. Most tools allow you to locate emails using Boolean logic, keyword filters, and metadata indexing, but the most advanced tools offer keyword search and eDiscovery capabilities.
- Legal hold: If you’re deploying the solution for a legal use case, you should be able to apply legal holds to prevent data from being deleted. On a similar note, you should also be able to export archived emails in industry-standard formats for legal review.
- Audit logging: Your solution should create an audit trail of every action carried out within the archive.
- Automated alerts: The solution should notify you immediately of issues such as failed journaling, storage capacity limits being reached, or unauthorized access attempts.
- Integration: The solution should integrate seamlessly with your email platform for smooth data ingestion.
- Scalability: The solution should be able to handle growing email volumes and scale to meet your organization’s storage requirements.
- User-friendly interface: The solution should provide intuitive navigation that makes it easy for IT admins, compliance officers, and end users to access archived emails.
Future trends: The email archiving space is already well established, but we do expect to see some evolutions as the market continues to grow.
First, due to their cost-effectiveness, scalability, and flexibility, we expect increasingly more organizations to adopt cloud-based archiving tools, as opposed to on-prem. This trend is also being influenced by the gradual migration of organizations using on-prem email services to cloud-based mailboxes (e.g., switching from Exchange on-prem to Microsoft 365).
Second, we expect more archiving tools to integrate machine learning capabilities to improve their data indexing, search functionality, and retrieval speed, making it both easier and quicker for users to find and retrieve emails. Some tools may also implement AI and ML to automate archive management.
Finally, as organizations call out for easier management and fewer siloed solutions, we expect more email archiving providers to pivot to a unified data management approach, where they deliver email archiving, file archiving, and compliance tools within one platform.
Further Reading: You can find all our articles on email archiving in our Archiving Software Hub.
No time to browse? Here are a few articles we think you’ll enjoy:
- Shortlist: The Top 11 Email Archiving Solutions For Business
- Interview: How Organizations Can Better Manage And Proactively Protect Corporate Data
- Blog: Why Is Email Archiving Important?
- Blog: What Is the Best Way to Store Emails Long-Term?
