Archive Attender

This simple way to archive emails from Exchange Server works with any storage.

It would be difficult to argue against the fact that we get too much email. The number of messages received by individual recipients at companies continues climbing, and while in the good old days we may have solved the problem of overflowing inboxes with an afternoon wielding the delete key, modern compliance requirements mean this is no longer an option.

Emails have to be kept, and that means archiving. This can in itself become a major activity, so what's needed is a way to manage the archiving process without massive requirements for specialist databases or tying you in to a particular hardware solution.

Archive Attender is an archiving solution that meets these requirements. It lets system administrators specify policies for how messages should be archived, and can use Active Directory user and group information to control how particular users are treated. The software will move or copy messages from Exchange mailboxes, PST files and public folders to any type of storage, so long as it can be seen on the network.

Archive Attender is flexible, doesn't need a SQL database to store the archived emails, and is device agnostic - so long as there's storage space, you can use it. Once archived, the messages can be indexed so they appear in either user or administrator searches.

The main administration element of the software is an application console where the administrator can set policies, choose the users the policies should be applied to, and say where the archived emails should be stored. There's a web-based application for Internet Information Server (IIS) that lets users search for emails and retrieve them. This application can be accessed from within Outlook or Outlook Web Access, and users can search for and restore emails from within Outlook or OWA.

Behind the scenes there's a Windows service that connects to your Exchange server, and archives emails from its message store based on the policies you've created.

Archive Policies

The admin console lets you set up archiving policies for specific mailboxes, entire Exchange Servers or for Active Directory groups. When designing your archiving policies, you can schedule the archiving to happen during a particular time period, so you could choose to archive before 8.30 or after midnight so your users don't notice a drop in performance on their emails.

What actually happens to archived emails is that they are extracted from the Exchange message store as individual Outlook message files, each having its own .MSG file. These are then compressed, and stored in folders on the storage device you've identified.

You can choose to archive based on the sender, subject, age, and size of the message, along with the mailbox quota. If these choices aren't enough for you, you can get more choices if Archive Attender is used alongside Sherpa Software's Mail Attender. This gives the additional choices of archiving emails and attachments based on keywords, message content, and attachment type.

Back in Archive Attender, the archiving service monitors the policies created by the administrator, and queries the user mailboxes on the schedule you've created. When it finds a message that should be archived, it retrieves it and moves the message to the specified archive location.

Retrieving archived messages

From the user's viewpoint, their messages remain visible in their inbox as message stubs, partial messages that contain a summary of the archived message along with a hyperlink that when clicked, retrieves the original message from the archive. The stubs can be either plain text or HTML, dependent on your company policy on email type. Going the other way, users can archive their own messages and attachments if they wish to do so, and if the administrator has given them permission.

New in version 3.5 of Archive Attender is an "Auto-Aging" mechanism. This lets an administrator control and modify the type of stub and how long it remains in a user's mailbox based on the age of the message's received date. This option is configured much like an archiving policy and is assigned to specific users or groups of users.

Archive Attender isn't just limited to archiving messages, however. You can choose to archive Outlook and Exchange contacts, calendar entries, notes, tasks and journal entries.

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