Email Server Management: The Solution
In the last blog we discussed the issues the IT department faces as they manage email servers. Today we will discuss the solution to email server management: “email archiving”. We already know the problem; now we need a solution which will satisfy all the stake holders. The IT department is tasked with maintaining the optimal email server in terms of both size and performance. Users want unlimited space and ideal performance; any IT professional knows that more space means poorer performance, and vice versa. It seems like an impasse.
These issues seem to take us in different directions, but they’re not actually hard to reconcile. The solution is rather simple: deploy an email archiving solution.
The Solution – Email Archiving Solution
A properly implemented email storage solution improves performance by providing an archiving architecture and improves space by offering deep storage – capturing all the incoming and outgoing emails. It stores them, indexes their content and keeps them all in safe email storage. All the existing emails which are on the mail server are loaded on the database during a process called the initial load.
Healthy Email Server
So all existing emails have been uploaded during the initial load and the new email archiving system is capturing all the incoming and outgoing emails. Wait – how does it solve anything? Isn’t it just an extra load on the email server using double the storage? Slow down – we are coming to secret ingredient. Next, bring out the machete and cut the mailbox size to as small as possible. Ok, guys don’t get carried away with it – end users are our friends. So give them three months of email or six months if you are feeling generous.
Happy End Users
Wait, wait we are not done yet. Remember “end users are our friends”, we need to give them unlimited mailbox. All end users get the MS Outlook plug-in (or Lotus Notes plug-in). This plug-in is the door to unlimited mailbox. The end user can access all their emails – and we mean all their emails – using this plug-in. So, remember we said 90% of emails are attachments. So be it – they can reside happy in the email archiving solution. Our email server is running like a champ!!
We cannot leave without giving an illustration of our amazing email archiving solution – OK so it is not that amazing but isn’t it pretty close?
