What Is Email Archiving? How It Works, Why It’s Important, and How to Do It

Email archiving is the process of securely storing emails, making it easy to search for and retrieve them. It’s a fast, reliable, and scalable solution to storing essential emails while reducing the load on mail servers. In other words, It helps store old emails that you don’t need immediate access to, but don’t want to delete.

Beyond the convenience of quickly finding emails and preserving server speeds, email archiving is vital for security and compliance purposes. In short, it’s just good business practice.

Email archiving is the act of moving emails from a primary inbox into a separate archive. Organizations and individuals can archive emails they don’t currently need to access, but may need to access in the future.

It is a fast, reliable, and scalable solution for storing essential emails while reducing the load on mail servers.

In other words, archiving helps store old emails that are not immediately needed but should not be deleted.

Archiving emails serves multiple essential purposes that contribute to an organization's efficiency and email security.

Here are the key reasons organizations invest in email archiving:

• Compliance: Federal regulations often require organizations to follow strict requirements with documents containing sensitive information. Email archival can help meet compliance requirements for tamperproof, redundant email storage. This is particularly important in industries with strong email regulations.

• E-discovery: Archiving assists with electronic discovery (E-discovery), which can help users quickly retrieve emails during litigation, audits, or similar situations.

• Storage Management: By archiving older emails, organizations reduce the storage capacity within mail servers, improving inbox performance.

• Business Continuity: Recovering from a disaster is crucial for organizations to keep operating in their essential functions. Email archiving can make restoring an inbox after a cyberattack a lot easier.

Archiving is different from deleting. You should only archive emails you want to keep, while you can delete spam, junk, or any irrelevant emails.

Archiving is easy to use, but it may not necessarily meet compliance or operational requirements for organizations.

In this case, how email archiving works will depend on the email archiving tools an organization implements. Email archiving tools can automatically archive emails based on rules. For example, an organization may set it up so that all incoming emails are archived.

Different email platforms provide various methods to archive and retrieve archived emails. Here’s how to do it in Gmail and Outlook.

Archiving emails in Gmail is relatively easy.

1. Go to the Gmail inbox.

2. Select the email by clicking on the box on the left side of the email line.

3. Click on the Archive icon (It looks like a box with a downward arrow) located above the inbox or to the right side of the email line.

To access archived emails:

1. Go to the left sidebar and look for the folder "All Mail"

2. Use the search bar to find the archived email

Outlook has a similar process to Gmail to retrieve archived emails.

• Go to the Outlook inbox (It's not possible to archive emails in other folders like the sent folder)

• Select the email you want to archive

• Click the Archive button on the top menu bar

Unlike Gmail, Outlook has a specific folder for emails marked as archived. Here is how to view archived emails in Outlook:

• Click on the Archive folder in the left menu bar

• Scroll to find archived emails or use the search bar to find specific archived emails

When evaluating email archiving solutions, organizations should consider several factors to ensure they select the best option for their needs:

• Vendor Lock-In: Relying on an external archiving service can create vendor lock-in, making it difficult and costly to switch providers later. Organizations are more likely to change solutions within their security stack than their cloud-based productivity suites.

• Compliance: Organizations need to comply with local and global data privacy laws. An email archiving solution must support compliance with these regulations.

• Data Security: Archived emails, especially those containing sensitive data, need protection against threat actors. Some security features, like encryption and privileged access management, can keep data secure.

• Impact on Security Posture: The security posture of the archiving service itself becomes a concern. These solutions may not be under the umbrella of the security team, and visibility into users’ privileges, access control, encryption, and compliance becomes more difficult to control.

• Cloud-Based or On-Premise: Organizations will need to consider if they want their archived emails stored on-premise, in the cloud, or in a hybrid solution. This can impact which email archiving solution is best for your situation.

• Compatibility: Choose an email archiving solution compatible with your email provider. For example, an organization using Microsoft Office may want to choose a cloud-based archiving solution for easier deployment.

• Archiving Process: There are several ways to archive emails. The ideal format depends on what emails need to be archived for an organization. Compliance can also affect what emails are stored. Choose an archiving solution with the most sensible process.

• Search and Retrieval: Have an easy and efficient way to search and find past emails, especially for litigation or similar situations. The solution needs to sort, organize, and present email data in a searchable way.

• Ease of Deployment: Organizations also need to consider how easy a solution is to deploy. If there isn't a large IT team, a managed service may be the best option. Another consideration is whether it can store past emails without risking data loss.

Here are some best practices to consider when implementing or reviewing an email archiving solution:

• Review Laws and Regulations: Stay up-to-date with regulatory changes to ensure ongoing compliance.

• Create or Update Retention Policies: Regularly review and update retention policies to align with compliance and operational needs. Email archiving tools can automate the enforcement of retention policies.

• Ensure Employee Awareness: Educate employees on retention policies and the importance of following them. Incorporate these guidelines into regular security awareness training.

Abnormal can stop phishing emails from putting your organization at risk. Schedule a demo to see how we do it.