Journal Mailboxes

Microsoft Exchange has built in functionality for journaling. Journaling is the process of taking a copy of email messages and placing 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 special format with the original message attached to a journal report. Most organisations tend to have a single journaling mailbox however it is possible for multiple journaling mailboxes to be configured.

Exclaimer Mail Archiver draws upon this functionality to provide a robust, easily accessible archive of all messages (or defined subsections of email). By default, the Exclaimer Mail Archiver service polls Exchange journaling mailboxes continuously, extracting messages and pushing them through the Exclaimer rules engine. Here, any archiving policies are processed to determine which archive store each message will go to.

When messages are archived, they are 'unpacked' from the special journaling mailbox format and presented in a readable form when a search is performed. Users with appropriate permissions can also view properties associated with each message - for example, to whom the message was delivered.

To achieve all of this, Exclaimer Mail Archiver needs to know:

Which Exchange journaling mailboxes to poll - a journal mailbox importer should be added for each Exchange journaling mailbox.
How often polling should occur - define settings for each journal mailbox importer that is added.
How to handle messages that are not archived for a range of reasons - use folder management options to manage these cases.

Email messages are removed from the Exchange journal mailbox when they are processed by Exclaimer Mail Archiver. If a message cannot be archived to a store (typically because it does not meet criteria specified in any defined policies) it is moved to an appropriate sub folder within the original journal mailbox. For further information about these sub folders please refer to the folder management topic.