Data Protection & Continuity
Email Archiving
Independent, immutable archiving of Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace mail with fast eDiscovery search, legal hold and retention policies that satisfy regulators.
Every message, searchable, tamper-proof
Mailbox retention policies and archiving solve different problems. Retention decides how long a user keeps a message; archiving creates an independent, tamper-proof record of what was sent and received regardless of what the user subsequently does with it.
That distinction matters the moment somebody needs to produce every communication with a particular counterparty over a three-year period, or a departing employee empties their mailbox, or a regulator asks you to demonstrate that records cannot be altered after the fact.
We archive every inbound, outbound and internal message at the point of transmission, index the full text and attachments, and hold it in immutable storage under a retention policy you define. Searching years of history takes seconds instead of days.
What is included
- Journal-level capture of inbound, outbound and internal mail
- Full-text indexing of message bodies and common attachment formats
- Immutable, write-once storage that prevents post-hoc alteration
- Retention policies configurable per user, department or record class
- Legal hold that suspends deletion for named custodians
- Self-service search for end users where policy allows
- Export in evidentially sound formats for legal proceedings
- Mailbox size reduction by moving historic mail out of the live tenant
What you get out of it
- eDiscovery requests answered in minutes rather than weeks
- A record that survives mailbox deletion and staff departure
- Demonstrable compliance with records-retention obligations
- Smaller, faster live mailboxes
Archiving is not the same as backup
Backup exists to restore a system to a previous state after a failure, and it is optimised for bulk recovery over a relatively short retention window. Archiving exists to find a specific item across years of history, and it is optimised for search, immutability and retention.
Using one for the other produces poor results in both directions: restoring a whole mailbox to find one message is slow and clumsy, and a backup will usually not prove that a message was never altered. Most regulated organisations need both, running side by side.
Where this fits
You operate in a regulated sector
Financial services, healthcare, legal and public-sector organisations typically carry statutory obligations to retain communications in an unalterable form for defined periods.
You have faced a dispute or investigation
The cost of reconstructing email history without an archive, in staff time and legal fees, usually exceeds several years of archiving in a single matter.
Staff turnover is losing institutional knowledge
When someone leaves, their mailbox is often deleted with the licence. An archive preserves the correspondence the business still depends on.
Frequently asked questions
- Does Microsoft 365 not already do this?
- Microsoft offers in-place archiving and retention labels, which are genuinely useful, but they live inside the same tenant they are protecting and are administered by the same accounts. An independent archive removes that single point of control and typically offers substantially faster search across large volumes.
- Can users still search their own archived mail?
- Yes, where your policy allows it. Many organisations grant self-service search of a user's own history while restricting cross-mailbox search to compliance staff.
- How long can we retain messages?
- Retention is policy-driven and can run from a fixed number of years to indefinite, with different rules for different record classes. Legal hold overrides deletion for named custodians until the hold is lifted.
Ready to move on Email Archiving?
We will scope it against your actual environment, not a generic package, and give you a fixed price before any work starts.