Microsoft Exchange 2010

Email archiving is extremely important to business as well as personal users. Email backups are another method of saving emails beyond and above saving them in an inbox. Users do not need to keep an email in their inbox once they have saved it in email archiving. They simply need to hit the archive button or send it to the archive folder. Once the file is sent to that area, they do not need to worry about it.

That is, until they need it. There may be a question about an older order or someone may be confused about a detail of a meeting. They can consult the older email archiving feature. That way they will be ready to go and not have to contact the other person again. Email archiving increase productivity by over 50% among individuals who use it within their web mail or desktop email clients. Email archiving is quite similar to search through your email. A user is typically able to pull up an email by entering the email address, subject line or keywords that they are looking for. The more details they know, the better luck they will typically have with accessing the email.

Email archiving is a relatively new feature to be added to many web mail programs as well as desktop clients. Google Mail commonly known as Gmail is infamous for its archive button. Google is also the king of search and their email archiving product is extremely good. Businesses who are interested in using it can sign up under the Google Apps for Business program. This program gives each business user an email address under the corporate domain name as well as access to Google Docs and Calendar. Email archiving on Google Apps for Business can save a business time from having to contact customers to ask for clarification as well as time searching for an old email conversation.

Email archiving also makes it easy for bad people to access your email. You need to ensure that you have a strong password. Criminals who are smart can search for “credit card password” or “bank statement” and find which bank you bank with. They also can reset these passwords and delete these emails from your account. This takes a matter of minutes, thanks to the email archiving software. However, with a secure password this will never become a problem for you.

Have a to do list that needs to be updated? Well, check your recent client requests with client archiving. Need to see which unread messages have been sent to the archive? No problem! Email archiving software does not have to be difficult to use either. Even older users or younger users who have never used it before understand the basics of how to use the software. Best of all, users are able to quickly consult emails and then get back to the task at hand. Secretaries for email at some major companies have already been eliminated. Interns are able to search for keywords through email archiving software, solving the problem of an onslaught of email.

Every internet service provider has free email hosting because it comes with your monthly subscription. Approximately three years ago, Google began free email hosting for businesses assuming online and other businesses would fade. This may not have been their intention, but it is what other businesses were worried about. Since established email hosting businesses saw this coming, they revolutionized their way of service. They offered more features, built their relationships with their customers, and many aligned themselves with each other. Revolutionizing the way they provided email hosting actually helped them when Google announced that their email hosting was free.

The main way that Google and other free email hosting sites are paid is by having advertising on businesses web pages. This is what keeps email free with these sites.
So the question is – is it worth paying for an email hosting service? Absolutely it is. Email hosting services offer businesses much more than the previous mentioned company. They offer spam blockers, php services, amongst other amazing features that are just too many to list. Good luck trying to get any customer service support from free email hosting services. Many businesses think that having ads on sites is a nuisance and unnecessary. When one pays for email hosting, more storage space is widely available just with a few dollars per month. As mentioned above, security is also better. There are things called spam bots that look for a number of things to destroy your website. One of theses things is email. I have an website with email hosting and I was ignoring my spam blocker because I didn’t think I would get as much spam as I did. When I ignored the spam, I received more than eighty ignorant spam emails per day. It became a hassle just deleting them, so finally I searched my email hosting and web hosting company trying to figure out a better way to block the spam.

Eventually, I found an anti-spam blocker in my control panel, downloaded it, and now I have been one hundred percent free of spam. I am able to control it. This almost backfired on me because there is a place that you set how many emails are allowed. I set it to one per email, then a friend emailed me twice, which went to my spam folder. Needless to say, this was easily resolved.

In truth, if you own a business and you don’t have a paid email hosting service, you will soon regret it. I could understand not paying for email hosting if it cost in excess of $40 per month. Almost all email hosting can be purchased for under ten dollars per month, so it is inexcusable if your a business and you don’t have email hosting. There are websites in abundance that offer email hosting, but you can get it right here, right now at our site. Make it worth your while as you see your business becoming more profitable with email hosting.

A recent study by technology company, CMSWire, found that many companies in the United States get email archives and backups mixed up.  As unbelievable as it sounds, the confusion is still rife, even years after the legislation came into force, and organizations are being caught out all the time.

For those who still don’t know the difference, a backup is when a copy is taken of a given media and stored elsewhere.  This is to provide disaster recovery should any disaster befall the building, the company or its infrastructure.  Every business should have a comprehensive backup process that is followed to the letter, but it is different to archiving.

An archive is designed to copy, store and manage data for the longer term.  It is designed to be a permanently separate, accessible silo where the data can be safely kept.  Ideally it would be sited somewhere other than the premises, in a purpose built facility where it is protected from all forms of harm such as flood and fire.

In the case of an email archive, for compliance, the email data is siphoned off the corporate email platform and formatted into a particular state.  It is then indexed, compressed and then stored safely somewhere else.  That storage should be secure, safe and resilient, so the client can access their data should the need arise.

A backup can run in conjunction with an archive, but are completely separate entities.  They should not be confused.  The only driver for a backup procedure is disaster recovery and damage limitation.  Archiving is necessary to satisfy a range of legal obligations that are enforced aggressively, as well as the retention of important information.

It isn’t only for E-discovery that archiving is a good idea.  Business depends a lot of email using it as the main means of communication both internal and external.  Often corporate communications, policy changes and even external contracts are communicated this way, and they are important for any business to retain for a period of time.

On paper it is an easy mistake to make.  Both processes make copies of stuff for retrieval later but only one will protect an organization from litigation if an E-discovery request comes their way.

While emails can be retrieved from a backup, it is a time-consuming and laborious task.  With no real indexing facility, finding emails may take a significant amount of time, especially in larger, communication heavy organizations.

An email archive makes it easier to follow email trails and the branches that can occur when mail is copied and forwarded to multiple recipients.  A thorough implementation should also comply with the relevant legislation and prevent any action being taken against the company for non-compliance.

Let’s set the record straight once and for all.  A backup policy is good methodology, but entirely optional.  Email archiving is not.  It is mandatory and specified in more than a few laws.  Ever since those very high profile corporate scandal cases, every business has had to comply with a set of stringent compliance laws that demands an effective trail be left with any documentation of any kind.

With personal information now a commodity, even if you aren’t a celebrity or work for the government, there is still a case for email encryption, even if it’s to make you feel more secure.

It’s easy to sit back and think that all the security scares are just security consultants hyping everything up to look worse than they are.  While it is often the case, either that or scaremongering, there is a case for protecting yourself as much as possible, including email.

You wouldn’t send personal information to someone on the back o a postcard for everyone to see, so why is sending it over email any different?  If you have the right skills, reading other peoples email is a simple thing to achieve.  Considering how much we depend on it, and what we use it for, not protecting it seems foolish.

Using email encryption isn’t something the government wants you to do as it makes snooping on your more difficult, however protecting yourself and your personal information is more important than that.  Despite moves to the contrary, it is still currently perfectly legal to encrypt any and all communications you make.  For as long as that is the case, everybody should encrypt their email.

It isn’t as difficult to do as you may imagine either.  Companies like Thawte and Comodo offer free personal digital certificates to use in conjunction with your mail to encrypt the messages and to prove that messages you send are really from you.  They are free and made available to you in a couple of minutes.  You just have to give the company your name email address and a password and they will provide you with a certificate which you can use with your favorite email client.

The certificate works by digitally signing your email, which the recipients can see.  They also encrypt the email by using keys.  You have a private key, which only you know, and you provide public keys for the email recipients so they can decrypt the mail.  That way every one of your mails is protected from all but the most determined hacker.

If you choose to use this method of email encryption, ensure that all email is protected.  Only encrypting the important mails will tell any hackers exactly what email to concentrate their efforts on.  Encrypting them all will have them working hard to crack even the most mundane mails, which is sure to drive them off.

Email encryption is free, and easy to configure.  Digital certificates work with most email clients, and you don’t have to only send important emails to warrant using one.  Protecting yourself, and your personal information is as important as locking your car when you leave it or securing your home when you go away.  It should become second nature, and you should make every effort to secure yourself as well as your property.

Legalities aside, email archiving should be used by businesses large and small, no matter what their line of business. It was once thought to be the preserve of public companies until the changes in legislation made sure every company in the country had to comply.

Email archiving is also useful for internal purposes such as employee monitoring. While not very popular with staff, emails can be stored, retrieved and used for disciplinary or investigative purposes as well as compliance with internal guidelines. This kind of monitoring can not only warn the company about breaches in security, potential risks and insider dealing.

With an effective email archiving solution, alerts can be set up for keywords or key phrases in an email that can flag up potential risks as they happen. If this traffic is monitored regularly then action can be taken at the earliest signs, and potentially prevent it getting out of hand. The keywords can be anything pertinent to the business from resume, career, swear words, to client file, secrets, medication and anything company specific.

While this activity may not seem ethically sound, it is another tool in the ongoing mission to protect companies from damage from without, and within. Employees are often unaware of the problems they cause by sharing information they shouldn’t or gossiping about subjects that are better off left alone. If an effective email monitoring and archive system is in place then these kinds of incidents can be stopped in their tracks by early intervention or discipline.

Most smaller to medium companies don’t have a legal department so the burden falls to IT. In an in-house email archiving setup they will be the ones who control and maintain the system anyway so it’s logical for them to monitor. However, in an outsourced situation that burden can be passed to the vendor to take care of.

There is inevitably an expense to setting up an archiving solution, but in this country it is one that businesses cannot avoid. Since those high profile corporate fraud cases, it has been legally mandated that every company large or small who communicates via email has to have some kind of storage and archive facility for them.

If an E-discovery request is presented to a company without a coherent archive strategy, they may have trouble finding the data requested, or even worse, may not be able to find it at all. This not only causes problems for the litigation for which the data is bound, but also for the company itself. The government and judiciary don’t look kindly on those who don’t comply with these new laws as it hampers them when they are trying to investigate companies.

The whole idea of the new legislation was to improve public confidence in American business by ensuring there was always a paper trail for everything they did. Anything that gets in the way of that is viewed dimly indeed.