Do-it-yourself Backups: Basic Email Archiving

Basic Email Archiving Highlights

• Per-user, domain, or account
• Archive inbound and/or outbound email
• No per-user cost; pay only for disk space used
• Searchable, WebMail and IMAP-accessible archives/backups
• Available to all LuxSci email hosting customers with their own domain name(s)
• Exempt users from archival / backup
• Apply custom filters to the archived email as it arrives
• Messages can be edited, annotated, and deleted from the archives.
• Not appropriate for compliance. See Premium Email Archival to meet compliance needs.

Motivation

While LuxSci provides nightly and weekly backups of your data, many users and companies require much more, such as:

• Keeping an available backup copy of all "recent" messages to/from individual users
• Keeping archival copies of all email messages to/from all users in the account for a period of time.

To meet these needs without subscribing to Premium Email Archival, Basic Email Archiving is appropriate.

Capture Inbound/Outbound Email

LuxSci provides domain-wide features for sending copies of all inbound and/or outbound email to specific archival email address (at LuxSci or elsewhere). This "capturing" of email can apply to everyone, or some users can be made exempt.

You can also employ Outbound Email Scanning to send copies of messages containing certain content (based on matching keywords or regular expressions) to an archival or auditor address (You can also block such messages or auto-encrypt them based on content). This allows you to monitor and enforce policies on the content of the email messages that your employees or users are permitted to send.

Using capturing and/or outbound content monitoring, you can send a stream of all important email to an email address at LuxSci for backup or archival.

Email that is filtered and denied or quarantined by Premium Email Filtering will not be included in the backups - so you don't have to archive or store Spam and Viruses.

Archive Email Folders

The folders of your archival address (and indeed, any user) can be configured to keep themselves manageable by making dated copies of themselves once they reach a certain size, number of messages, or every month, for example. With auto-archival enabled, the mail folders in the archival user will always remain a manageable size, even if you are capturing large amounts of email every day.

Archival can be configured to occur daily, weekly, monthly, every few months (where "few" can be 2, 3, 4, or 6), yearly, or after the folder in question reaches a specified size. When archival does happen, all messages are moved to a new dated folder. I.e. on May 5th, "INBOX" might be moved to "INBOX.2011-05-01" and a new empty INBOX created for new messages to be deposited in.

Exporting Archival Email Folders

Users can download email folders of any size. The download is a compressed "ZIP" file containing all of the messages in the folder formatted in your choice of the standard "EML" "or "UNIX" mailbox formats.

This easy method for downloading folders provides a means of removing your email archives from the server and saving them locally in a format that should be easily importable to any other email system. If you wish, you can then delete the archives from our servers to conserve disk space.

You can also download messages from the archives using IMAP to copy directly from the server.

Ordering

All of these basic email archiving features are available to all LuxSci email hosting accounts that have their own domain name(s). There is nothing special to buy or sign up for, as these are standard LuxSci features. The cost involved is merely the cost of storing email in your account.