Email Archiving – Do You Need to Keep Everything?

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Email Archiving – Do You Need to Keep Everything

The average office worker receives 121 emails per day. Even if you estimate half of them as spam, that leaves around 60 per day, or 300 per workweek that is filling up a person’s inbox.

It’s no wonder that Outlook, Mac Mail, or another mail program can end up getting slow under the weight of gigabytes of mail. Search functions can stop working suddenly due to memory issues and mail programs can begin taking forever to open in the morning due to all those messages.

Business email is one of the main applications that people work in most throughout the day, so when it’s slow, it makes a big impact on productivity. What to do with email is a quandary for many people because they’re afraid of deleting something they might need later.

An average of 28% of the workday is spent on email.

A majority of people end up becoming “email hoarders” saving nearly all their email just in case it might be needed in the future. 

And it’s not just the incoming emails that could be weighing your mail program down, sent emails also add up fast. And if they have file attachments, those also count towards the “weight” of your mail application. 

The common problems that happen when your mail program gets too big with too many emails are:

  • Mail program takes a long time to open
  • The search feature may stop working correctly
  • Send and receive function can get stuck and stop working
  • Messages may stop showing properly in the preview pane
  • It becomes more difficult to find recent messages

The dilemma is, how do you get older messages that you don’t need to access regularly out of your inbox without deleting them? Often, older email messages need to be kept in case they must be referenced later.

For example, a company may have a legal reason for needing to keep older correspondence. Company policies may require backup copies of emailed invoices or quotes.

With many businesses in Orlando and elsewhere trying to go as paperless as possible, that means electronic documents via email might be the only copy of important communication.

Options to Archive Email & Clean Out Your Inbox

There are several options for safely archiving email and cleaning out your inbox without losing access to important historical communications.

Email archiving means preserving email in a searchable format so messages can be accessed later if needed. However, they are no longer in the active area of your email program that you work in daily.

Archiving solves the problem of email apps getting overburdened with messages and the need to save certain mail in case it’s needed years later. 

Here are some great options for cleaning out your inbox without losing your older messages.

Dropsuite

Dropsuite is an email backup and archiving application that C Solutions supports. It adheres to compliance regulations and can be used with just about any email program.

Dropsuite can archive mail for:

  • Microsoft/Office 365
  • G Suite / Google Workspace
  • Hosted Exchange
  • Open-Xchange
  • IMAP/POP 
  • Websites

The application allows businesses to store emails, attachments, calendar items, tasks, and more in an easy-to-search format. Emails are archived securely, and it also includes an email backup feature.

Retention Policies in Microsoft 365

Organizations can automatically archive user mail by enabling archive mailboxes for users of Microsoft 365. 

Admins can visit the Security & Compliance Center in Microsoft 365 and go to Information governance > Archive to find the settings for this.

Admins can enable an archive mailbox for each user and then set up mail retention policies that automatically move mail from a user’s inbox to their archive mailbox after a certain period of time (e.g., 3 years).

Further, a policy can be set up to delete items from the Deleted Items folder after a certain period, which helps reduce the old and unneeded messages stored in their Outlook inbox.

Exchange Online Archiving Subscription

Microsoft offers Exchange Online Archiving for $3/user/month. This is another option for archiving company email for users. It offers anywhere access, data retention policies, eDiscovery, 50 GB of archive storage, and more.

Move Internal Communications to Teams

One way to drastically cut down on the volume of emails that users have to deal with is to move internal company communications to a platform like Microsoft Teams in Microsoft 365.

Many companies have been moving to real-time messaging for internal communications because it’s faster than email and keeps messages consolidated by topic and easily searchable.

It’s also been found that people tend to be more succinct and efficient in their communications when communicating via messaging rather than email.

Get Help With Affordable Email Archiving Solutions

C Solutions can help your Orlando area business get a handle on email overload and put an effective email archiving solution in place.

Schedule a free consultation today! Call 407-536-8381 or reach us online.