Exclaimer Mail Archiver Overview

With ever increasing regulatory requirements for electronic communication and high profile cases centered on email evidence, email archiving has never been more important. Exclaimer Mail Archiver is a simple but scalable solution which takes a fresh approach to email archiving by:

• Drawing upon Microsoft Exchange journaling functionality to ensure that nothing is overlooked

• Using archiving policies so you can control if and where emails are archived

• Archiving messages to secure, robust, purpose-built archive stores

• Providing fast, innovative, cross-mailbox search utilities for desktop computers and web-enabled mobile devices

• Allowing users to view and manage archived messages

Exchange journaling

Microsoft Exchange has built-in functionality for journaling, which takes a copy of all email messages and places the copies into a mailbox that has been designated as a journaling mailbox. When email messages are copied to the journaling mailbox, they are copied in a proprietary format and cannot be changed easily.  

Exclaimer Mail Archiver draws upon this functionality to provide a robust, easily accessible archive of all messages (or defined subsections of email). An Exclaimer Mail Archiver service polls any defined Exchange journaling mailboxes continuously, extracts (i.e. removes) messages and pushes them through the Exclaimer rules engine to determine if and then where they should be archived.  

Archive stores

Archived messages are distributed to archive stores. Different organizations have different requirements - many will archive all incoming and outgoing messages to a single store, whilst others will have more complex requirements - perhaps needing to archive defined subsets of email to different stores. A default store is automatically configured when Exclaimer Mail Archiver is installed but further stores can be added if required.

Traditional email storage is based upon a hierarchical structure utilizing tags and categories; Exclaimer Mail Archiver incorporates Web technology which archives messages in a flat structure, designed for maximum speed and reliability. Within each archive store, security permissions are configured to determine which users can access messages in that store when using search facilities and, if granted, what level of access those users have.

Archiving policies

Archiving policies are used to define a set of rules which determine if and then how email messages (both sent and received) are archived. Every policy is associated with an archive store, so you can specify where email messages (which meet given criteria for that policy) will be archived.

A comprehensive range of conditions and exceptions can be specified to control the circumstances under which policies are applied. If a message matches the criteria in a policy then it is archived to the specified store. If it is not matched, it is moved to a no policies applied sub folder.

Search

Once messages are archived, ensuring that users have appropriate access to them is critical.  With Exclaimer's powerful and innovative search engine  (with separate search indexes for each store for added flexibility), you can be confident that an archived message is never more than a few seconds away. Administrators can use the console search to search archive stores from within the Exclaimer console; other users can access web search options to search archive stores from desktop computers and web-enabled mobile devices.

Searches are defined using straightforward, intuitive options to build complex queries based upon a wide range of conditions and date range criteria. Having performed a search, any messages that match the specified criteria are displayed in the search results pane. Users will only see results for messages which they have access permissions to view.

Managing archived messages

Having located required email messages in the archive store, users with appropriate access permissions can choose to view email content, properties and any attachments. If required, messages can be restored to a mailbox or forwarded to a given email address.