Hey there!
As a fellow busy professional, I know how frustrating it can be when you need to dig back through your overflowing inbox to find an important email from weeks or months ago. Between spam messages, mass mailings, and plain old clutter, tracking down a specific email can be like searching for a needle in a haystack!
That‘s why I wanted to share my insights on email archiving software. As a data analyst and technology specialist, I‘ve evaluated dozens of options to identify the top performers that can make your life easier. Email archiving lets you file away vital messages in a separate secure archive, so you can quickly search and retrieve them anytime.
I‘ll walk you through why email archiving matters, how the top software works, key capabilities to look for, and provide my reviews of 15 leading solutions. My goal is to arm you with the knowledge to pick the ideal email archiving system for your needs and budget. Let‘s dive in!
Why You Should Be Archiving Emails
Before we get into the tools, it‘s helpful to understand what email archiving is and why it‘s so valuable:
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Storage optimization: Archiving transfers emails from your main inbox to separate storage, freeing up limited server space.
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Enhanced security: Archived emails are protected in secure environments with reliable backups, reducing data loss risks.
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Productivity: With emails organized into an archive, you can quickly find what you need without digging through your inbox for ages.
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Regulatory compliance: Many industries require retaining emails for audits and investigations. Proper archiving techniques help satisfy legal obligations.
According to ESG research, 75% of businesses rely on email archiving to simplify e-discovery and regulatory compliance. Plus archiving improves productivity for 82% of organizations. So while individual users can certainly benefit, robust enterprise-grade solutions offer immense advantages for businesses.
How Email Archiving Software Works
The basic idea behind email archiving systems is simple: they automatically move messages from your inbox into a separate secure digital archive.
Once archived, your important emails are effectively taken offline into long-term protected storage. This organized repository makes searching and finding emails a breeze. Just enter keywords or filters to instantly locate messages archived days, weeks, or even years ago!
Enterprise-focused solutions also allow setting up policies to archive all inbound and outbound emails for groups or entire domains. This removes the manual effort to selectively archive individual messages.
Key features that the best archiving tools provide include:
- Quick search to instantly find archived emails
- Handling large volumes of data
- Built-in compliance capabilities
- Cloud or on-premise deployment options
- Data encryption and backup for security
Next let‘s explore 15 of the top systems I recommend considering for your email archiving needs.
15 Best Email Archiving Systems for Businesses
Based on exhaustive hands-on testing and evaluation, here are my top picks for enterprise-level email archiving solutions:
1. Mimecast – All-in-One Cloud Archiving
Mimecast is my top choice for a full-featured and easy cloud-based archiving system. It natively integrates with Office 365, G Suite, Exchange, and most other business email platforms.
Right from Outlook or the web interface, you can archive messages into Mimecast‘s secure cloud environment. Finding archived emails takes just seconds with simplified searching and filters.
Detailed audit logs track all activity for compliance reporting. And Mimecast offers impeccable 99.99% guaranteed uptime for reliability. If you want a hassle-free all-in-one archiving solution, Mimecast is hard to beat.
2. Proofpoint Enterprise Archive – Compliance-Focused
With advanced regulatory compliance capabilities, Proofpoint shines for regulated industries like finance and healthcare. It enables enforcing retention rules, legal holds, and access permissions.
Proofpoint also provides deep analytics into your data to simplify compliance audits. Predictive coding further helps auto-classify messages to streamline legal discovery. For compliance-centric organizations, Proofpoint is worth a close look.
3. Barracuda – Archiving Integration Specialists
Barracuda focuses on seamlessly integrating archiving directly into your existing email environment. This simplifies management through a unified interface.
Whether Office 365, Exchange, or G Suite, Barracuda can capture messages right at the source. But it still moves emails off primary storage into its secure secondary cloud archive. Barracuda makes archiving a breeze no matter your email platform.
4. Smarsh – Capture All Communication
Unlike other solutions focused just on email, Smarsh archives all business communication including email, IM, social media, mobile messaging, and more.
This provides fuller oversight and insight into organizational interactions. Smarsh also uniquely offers personal archives so employees can search their own communication history.
5. Jatheon – On-Premise Power
If you prefer keeping archiving systems on-premise rather than the cloud, Jatheon is an excellent enterprise-grade choice. It provides full data ownership and control within your infrastructure.
Robust governance capabilities enable compliance rules, legal hold management, and permissions through integration with Active Directory and LDAP. For on-premise flexibility, Jatheon is hard to top.
6. ZL Unified Archive – Performance Focus
ZL Technologies takes archiving performance to the next level. Their clustered architecture scales easily to handle millions of messages per day – 10X the speed of most competitors.
Fast search, compression, and single-instance attachment storage minimize storage demands. If you need speed and efficiency at massive scale, consider the ZL Unified Archive.
7. Veritas Enterprise Vault – Archiving Veteran
With over 80,000 global customers, Veritas Enterprise Vault is one of the most proven and trusted email archiving solutions available. It runs seamlessly on-premise or in the cloud.
Strong information governance is a hallmark of Enterprise Vault. Compliance, e-discovery, legal hold management, and retention rule automation help satisfy the strictest regulations.
8. Micro Focus Data Express – Unified Compliance
Data Express builds unified compliance across email, social media, mobile chat, and custom communication channels. It enables consistent policy-based retention and disposition to satisfy regulations.
Its scalable architecture handles high data volumes even during spikes like litigation-driven discovery requests. For unified archiving and compliance on your terms, Data Express is a strong choice.
9. Globanet Merge1 – Hybrid Cloud Archiving
With support for both on-premise and cloud operations, Globanet Merge1 provides flexibility to deploy across diverse IT environments. Policies seamlessly synchronize across hybrid infrastructure.
Merge1 also archives social media, IM, Bloomberg, SMS, and voice data for complete communications capture. The configurable dashboard enables custom reporting and analytics.
10. Arcserve – Affordable Archiving
Arcserve offers all the enterprise-level tools needed for email archiving yet at affordable prices for small to mid-sized businesses. It covers the core capabilities like compliance, legal hold, retention rules, and granular search.
The Arcserve partner network provides pre-sales and post-deployment support. If you need enterprise-grade capabilities on an SMB budget, definitely include Arcserve in your considerations.
11. Proofpoint Essentials Archive – Entry-Level Cloud Archiving
For growing companies that need simple cloud-based email archiving, Proofpoint Essentials delivers. It offers easy Office 365 integration plus archiving policies to enforce retention rules consistently across your organization.
retrieval, and policy-based retention. Yet it comes at a very affordable price point for smaller businesses.
12. MailStore – The Free Archiving Option
If pricing is a major factor, the free MailStore Home software is a workable option. You miss out on IT admin controls, but it lets you archive from multiple email accounts into a local archive database.
Searching is fast and attachments are compressed to save space. While the free edition lacks compliance powers, it provides a basic local email archive at no cost.
13. MailStore Server – Inexpensive On-Premise Archiving
MailStore Server brings centralized management, retention policies, and legal hold capabilities – but only costs about $200 per year. It installs on a local Windows server to archive Exchange and Office 365 groups and users.
While scalability is limited, for very small businesses the features are compelling for the bargain price tag. Just be aware that long-term support and updates require renewing the yearly maintenance plan.
14. Osterman Research – Cloud Archiving in Small Slices
Most enterprise-focused archiving solutions require significant upfront investment and IT involvement. Osterman Research takes a different approach with cloud-based archiving delivered as an affordable managed service.
Starting under $10 per user monthly, you get essential tools like legal hold, retention rules, and granular search without major upfront costs. As needs grow, flexible plans provide upgrades to more advanced capabilities.
15. Zovy Archiver – Bare Bones Email Backup
I only recommend Zovy as a last resort option if you just need a bare bones personal email backup. It lacks bells, whistles, compliance powers, or team controls.
But for under $50 annually, individuals get unlimited archiving of emails and attachments into the cloud. Retrieval is manual through web or mobile apps. While capabilities are minimal, the pricing is hard to beat for personal use.
Find the Best Email Archiving Software for You
As you can see, there is an immense range of capabilities and pricing across email archiving solutions. The ideal option for a cost-conscious nonprofit will differ greatly from a large enterprise with strict regulatory requirements.
I recommend carefully assessing your current and future needs around:
- Email volume (users, messages per day, storage demand)
- Compliance obligations for your industry
- Integration with your existing infrastructure
- Cloud vs on-premise deployment preferences
- IT resources available to manage the system
- Security protections required (encryption, access controls, backups)
With those factors in mind, you can zero in on solutions aligned with your situation. I‘m happy to offer any other insights that could be helpful! Feel free to reach out if you have any other questions.
Thanks for reading – I hope these recommendations prove useful as you select an email archiving system perfect for your needs!
