Email Journaling vs. Email Mailbox Collection
Many questions have appeared over the last few months
regarding the differences between Mailbox collection and Journaling.. So What
are the differences and how can we use them in our presentations?
We see all sorts of
different system configurations and variations to cater for different customer
scenarios, but in most cases you’ll need to consider which combination of
“journaling”, and direct connection to individual mailboxes you’re going to use
to archive your email.
Method 1:
Direct mailbox collection
This archive option
is available to you by configuring Enterprise Vault so it connects to your
Exchange or Domino server with the ability to access all of your accounts in
one go, or with the credentials of each user to access your mailboxes
individually.
The pros and cons of
connecting directly?
Pros:
Historic mail – If you want to pull in some existing mail, so anything older than this
point in time, this is really the only effective way to do it quickly and the
way we’d recommend you do it.
Mailbox management – Connecting to mailboxes individually gives you the ability to purge
messages once they’ve been collected. This is how you’d automatically manage
mailbox sizes to prevent them from becoming overloaded.
Folder structures - Connecting directly enables you to synchronize the folder hierarchy
and essential if users wish to have the ability to browse their folders exactly
as they’re used to seeing them in Outlook.
Exclusions - unlike journaling which would
simply take a copy of everything, you’ll also be able to add exclusions so
certain folders aren’t archived when your jobs run.
Message locations – As users move messages between folders in Outlook, connecting directly
synchronizes the locations with those stored in the archive so emails are
always where you expect them when you use the browse view in Enterprise Vault.
Cons:
Not a good compliance tool – running archiving jobs
periodically allows a window of time when users could potentially delete or
modify email before they’re archived. This means you can’t class this method as
suitable for audit purposes. You would need safeguards in place so mail items
were not deleted prior to the archive run.
Job times – the main
drawback on larger deployments is that just the time it takes to connect and
view lots of mailboxes can be lengthy, this restricts this type of job to being
suitable for running once a day only.
Slow initial import – when you pull in your historic email, you’re likely moving a significant
amount of data so this is always going to take quite a while due to network/
bandwidth limitations. Of course you only need to do this once.
Network load – the overhead of connecting to multiple mailboxes is much greater than
polling a journaling account and usually something we see users schedule
outside of working hours.
Method 2:
Journaling
Despite the fact
it’s a feature of Exchange, it’s a term that when I mention it to customers,
still causes those momentary silent pauses so a quick clarification before I
start. In this context, it’s the process of using another dedicated mailbox to
store perfect, unmodified copies of every message that comes and goes from the
mail server (including messages sent between users internally). These mail
“copies” are sometimes referred to as compliance
copies.
Enterprise Vault
uses this journal mailbox archiving 24/7/365 then clearing out the contents
from the Exchange Information store. As a result, this journaled mailbox should
only ever contain messages that haven’t yet been archived.
So a quick look at
why journaling may or may not be a good idea for you…
Pros:
Compliance – this is the only way to ensure a copy of every email
ends up in your archive store. Particularly if you need to keep mail for long
periods because of industry legislation, you’ll definitely need to journal.
Regularly updated – it’s not practical to check lots of mailboxes regularly on an individual
basis as it would take too long in most cases, but using a journaling account
you can keep your archive updating every few minutes should you wish.
Sorting – this method automatically reads the information in the email headers to
sort and allocate messages to the relevant users
Low overheads – it’s an efficient way to trickle email into the archive all day
Cons:
Historic mail – journaling only archives new email from the time it is configured, it’s
not possible with this method alone to archive old existing messages (although
you can still upload PST’s)
Mailbox management – there’s no direct connection to users mailboxes so it’s not possible to
prune older, already archived messages. Used alone, a Journal job wouldn’t
tackle the issue of users keeping hold of large volumes of email
Folder structures – Journaling will only create in a single layer archive with no individual
user folder structure. Since the Journal mailbox is technically just another
mailbox, the mail arrives and would be archived from the Journal account
“inbox”.
So that’s
cleared it up then? Which is best for my environment?
My advice is that if
you can, configure Enterprise Vault to run both a regular journaling job, and a
daily mailbox archiving task. While this article is a compare and contrast
article, ideally you will not have to choose. There are many articles and tools
available for accurate sizing of these environments.
Using each method
really does provide you with the best of both worlds, in summary, the combined
headline benefits being:-
- Protection against message
deletion/ modification
- Fully audit compliant
- Automated management of
mailbox sizes
- Ability to browse folders
AND to search the archive
Hope
this clears up some of the mystery around this topic!