The infographic shows the results from a recent survey commissioned by GFI Software among 200 SMBs in the US and UK, and found, amongst other worrying statistics, that more than two-thirds of SMBs (69% and 66% respectively) fail to maximize the efficiency with which they extract useful business intelligence from archived email.

Find out why email archiving is so important for your business – check out our three minute video primer on email archiving and what it involves.

The surveys of 200 U.S.- and U.K.-based IT decision makers at organizations with between five and 249 employees were fielded by noted polling expert Opinion Matters, between November 1- 7, 2011.

Imagine an email archiving solution that not only helps you keep a record of all emails sent and received but also allows you to leverage the information in email to deliver insights into how the organization behaves and communicates. Just think how business risk could be reduced and email productivity better managed thanks to the information email provides you with. That would be great, wouldn’t it? Well you can because GFI MailArchiver now ships with MailInsights, the first data mining tools in an email archiving solution.

MailInsights enables admins to mine the data in emails sent and received by users. It gives you the same level of visibility into how the company email infrastructure is being used as you have when using Internet monitoring software – without violating users’ privacy or requiring admins to read through other users’ email. The robust reporting goes well beyond simple archiving and searching. Using GFI MailArchiver’s MailInsights tool, your email can provide you with insight into 16 areas, divided into seven categories:

Communications Flow

1. Who are users spending the most time emailing?
Are your users emailing customers, vendors, different offices, or people the next row over? We spend a lot of time on email, now you can determine just what we’re doing with it over time.

2. Who were the most important contacts for the last person who did that job?
When you’re new to a role, the first few weeks can be quite unproductive. Users can spend weeks just trying to get a feel for the job, understanding who their peers are, who the go-to people are, and so on. Being able to provide them a report, detailing who their predecessor emailed most often for example, can help them get up to speed quickly.

3. Which customers need a little more attention?
Customer satisfaction can be strongly influenced by communications with sales and/or support. Customers who send/receive a higher volume of email might be those that need a manager’s involvement.

4. Which customers would make good referrals?
The customers that your sales and support teams communicate with frequently can be some of your best referrals. Knowing who those are makes asking for references easy.

5. Who’s talking to whom?
Reorganizations, mergers, divestitures and acquisitions can all be disruptive. Knowing where the communication channels exist helps to determine what is working and what isn’t.

Personal Usage

6. How much email is sent to or received from personal services?
The popular mail services like Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, etc., are frequently the choice for personal email, not business services. Seeing how much mail goes to these services can help you determine whether email is being used only sparingly for personal use, or if someone is spending too much time on communications that are not business related.

Responsiveness

7. How long does it take users to respond to customer emails?
Customers hate waiting. When a customer sends an email, how long does he/she have to wait before getting a response? Knowing the answer to that question helps you make sure you are meeting SLAs, and can identify whether a customer satisfaction issue may be developing.

8. Is the helpdesk responding to user emails in a timely fashion?
One reason everyone calls the help desk is because they don’t want to wait for a response to an email. Using MailInsights you can now see just how long a user has to wait before getting a response which can help with internal SLAs, metrics and staffing decisions.

Storage

9. How much storage space is taken up by attachments?
Email is often the de facto file transfer system, both internally and with external parties. Email storage is a scarce resource, so knowing where all that disk space is going can help you justify expenditures, or develop policies to conserve that limited space.

10. Who are the mail hoarders?
MailInsights makes it easy to determine who hoards email and has the largest email load..

11. Are all those attachments business related?
Docx, pdf, and pptx files are exchanged daily between businesses and with customers. Audio files, like mp3, typically are not on the list of files you’d expect to be sent and received on a daily basis. With MailInsights you see how much premium space is being consumed by files that don’t have a business purpose or should be transferred in another manner not via email.

12. What’s a good attachment size limit?
This is a question many organizations will struggle with because they don’t have good metrics that show what users need or what users consume in terms of file size. MailInsights can tell you exactly what’s going on with attachment sizes – from the smallest to the largest file.

Stale accounts

13. Are inactive accounts still receiving email?
Inactive email accounts are often not deleted when an employee leaves the company and that inbox continues to receive emails. Important information or sales leads could be ‘lost’ unless someone is checking the account regularly. Being able to check whether inactive accounts are still getting email could help identify important opportunities or pending customer requests.

Policy violations

14. Are users maintaining a professional demeanor when using email?
Every email your users send is statement from your company. Checking emails for appropriate language helps maintain the company’s reputation.

15. Are users BCC-ing emails to personal accounts?
Most companies have policies prohibiting the blanket forwarding of company email to personal accounts. Most don’t have a way to detect when this policy is violated. MailInsights can report on BCC activities and identify users who want to keep their own email archive beyond the company’s reach and control.

Intellectual Property

16. Is anyone emailing the competition?
Emailing the competition may be harmless, or it could be the sign of an imminent defection, with corporate data as a kind of dowry. If you know that users are emailing the competition then you can start to investigate the issues before it becomes a more serious problem or data is lost or passed on to third parties..

Knowledge is powerful, and knowing what is going on within your email system helps ensure that your technology investment is being used wisely. GFI MailArchiver’s MailInsights is the tool email admins need to understand just how the system is being used.

Learn more about MailInsights and view sample reports and screenshots.

Have a look at what GFI MailArchiver can do to improve your email archiving system, or just download a free trial and give it a spin!

Office 365 offers a personal archiving option for users. It also has a native journaling facility, but this uses an email account that is external to the Office 365 environment. Companies needing a centrally controlled archive would be better off using  an email archiving software product, and this is where GFI MailArchiver comes into play. GFI MailArchiver works seamlessly with Office 365 to ensure that all messages to or from any user are archived. It is very easy to set up, and requires no software install or service ticket with Office 365 support. There are really only three basic steps:

1. As the Office 365 administrator, you need to first set up an Office 365 mailbox as a temporary store for all messages.
2. Then, you create a simple transport rule using the web portal that BCCs all email to the journaling mailbox.
3. Finally, you configure GFI MailArchiver to connect to this mailbox using IMAP so it can archive all messages. And you’re done.

Email archiving software solves many business needs. Companies with legal or regulatory compliance requirements  and those wishing to ensure that their intellectual property is preserved over time can use email archiving software to fully meet those obligations.

Email is a critical information channel for companies of any size, with business transactions with customers and vendors transacted over email every day. Meeting notes, design discussions, and business decisions often reside only in email, and users exchange how-to documentation using email all the time. Creating an archive preserves this invaluable data in a searchable form, ensuring that the intellectual capital can be reused and protected from loss that could come about from users deleting messages that they no longer consider important. It also provides an easy way for management to ensure compliance with company policy, and for IT to fulfill eDiscovery requests.

Read our GFI MailArchiver and Office 365 deployment guide to learn more on how this works.

One of the key features email storage software should offer is the centralization of emails and attachments. The storage software interfaces with your mail server to automatically capture email and file it in a central email archiving system. This should be done in an efficient manner to minimize storage costs. The captured emails and their attachments are indexed so that the organization can conduct full text searches across the archive and the contents of attachments. A good solution would be able to index as many attachment formats as possible, as well as zip files and their contents, to ensure accuracy in the search results.

With emails stored in a central location it becomes possible to ensure that emails and their use comply with company policies and filters. Most organizations are mandated to store their email communications for a number of years that depend on the compliance and the regulations relevant to that organization and its industry. It is imperative that the email storage solution offers fast and accurate results, and allows its users to perform searches across one or more fields including attachment contents. Solid email storage software would provide Boolean search functionality to meet the need for highly targeted searches.

Apart from the legal aspect, email storage software offers benefits to the business by helping cut IT costs. A web-based UI that allows users to perform searches or retrieve documents for compliance or legal purposes frees up the IT staff’s time from searching and retrieving email. Secondly, by centralizing email communications, email storage software helps offload email servers, like Exchange, from the load – thus enabling faster email for the organization while offering administrators faster backup and restore times for Exchange. A related benefit is that such a good storage solution is more efficient in its storage of email. This means that valuable disk space on the mail server itself will be freed up, while at the same time the storage costs required to keep email communications for the number of years required by legal/industry/internal rules are reduced.

Without email storage software, organizations would tend to quickly run out of space on their mail server and resort to saving old emails in PST files. PST files are spread throughout the organization on individual employees’ computers making it a major, and slow, undertaking should the organization need to search email communications in response to a legal request, for example. Due to their distributed nature, PST files are a problem to backup in a central location – a problem exacerbated by the increasing use of laptops.

In conclusion, good email storage software reduces business risk by enabling an organization to enforce policies over the archived emails, reduce storage costs and enable more efficient IT.

PST files benefit users and mail administrators alike. Users can find comfort in the fact that the PST file can be used to back up anything associated with Outlook to their computer’s hard drive or network storage. Mail admins encourage, or even mandate, the use of PST files to help keep the size of users’ mailboxes down to acceptable ranges because messages, and even attachments, can be stored in the users’ Personal Folders in Outlook rather than on the server itself. With so much data being held, PST file recovery becomes a vital business need; if the PST recovery fails, important information can be permanently lost.

If you have discovered that the PST files have been corrupted due to a hardware error or malware infection, then these issues need to be addressed before you can start the PST recovery. Run malware scans and take any necessary steps to clean infected files. For hardware problems, replace faulty components so that after you perform your PST recovery, the repaired files are not damaged.

The method of PST recovery recommended by Microsoft is to use the Inbox Repair Tool that is installed with Microsoft Outlook. On the computer you are performing the PST file recovery on the tool, Scanpst.exe, can usually be found under Programs|Accessories|System Tools. If it is not there then you will need to browse to drive:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12 (64 bit computers may house this in the Program Files (x68) folder.

When located, double click on the application to launch it.

Browse to the location of the PST files and click start to begin the process. Once the scan is complete and the errors are reported, you will be prompted to fix the errors through the PST file recovery process. Depending upon how damaged the file is, you may need to run the PST recovery more than once.

PST recovery is most often performed when no backup for the corrupted file exists. Another method of PST file recovery requires users to manually backup their PST files on a regular basis using the Import and Export function in Outlook. This method saves data from the PST file that the user chooses using the Export feature. For this information, the recovery can then be accomplished by running the Import function in Outlook. Outlook’s wizard makes this a fairly straightforward process however the users themselves are responsible for backing up their own PST files.

The real solution to PST file recovery would be one that is proactive, but takes the responsibility out of the users’ hands. This type of PST recovery can be achieved through email archiving software. This type of software, when integrated with Microsoft Outlook, can reduce the maintenance associated with PST files and recover lost or damaged data. By providing a central storage location for your company’s emails, the benefits of PST files can be obtained without the problems that go along with them.

In the meantime, media outlets will be rushing to get their stories and video footage of the event of the year online, feeding a huge demand for the juicy details of the Royal Wedding, comments on the princess’s dress and the quirky facts of the day.

And while everyone is busy catching up on the latest news from Buckingham Palace, I wonder what impact today’s wedding will have on email traffic flow around the globe.

We’ve already seen a considerable number of online wedding-themed scams over the past week and we can expect a lot more scams created over the next few days as the media pumps out more and more details, footage and pictures of the event and consumers devour it with relish.

As Christina Goggi’s earlier post on the wedding explained, scammers and malware creators are really latching on to the event pushing SEO poisoned search results, rogue antivirus scam and other nasty schemes and I would advise anyone looking up wedding-related material to be extremely careful.

Apart from the IT security concerns that usually come with these events, there is another issue that merits some discussion and that is email storage. Where, you may ask, is the correlation between email storage and the Royal Wedding?

Well, let’s step back a bit and consider people’s behaviour. You have a big event, everyone’s talking about and there is so much material available online that people want to share. The chances are a friend or colleague will want to share a link to a news story or an attachment and circulate to everyone on his email contact list.

If you only have a personal email, a few emails from friends won’t make a difference (unless they’re a scam or contain infected attachments) but what if you’re using a corporate email account? What if 20 employees decide to share an email with a video clip attached and each one, in turn, sends it to another 10 employees in the organization? Let’s say the clip is 5MB in size – you have a total of 200 emails with a 5MB attachment. That’s 1GB of data.

Now if everyone in the organization shares that email internally or externally, the volume of data passing through the email server at any point is going to be huge – and it’s going to impact not only on the overall capacity of the message store but also server performance.

Although some organizations may block certain file types at the gateway and use content filtering to block emails headers with particular keywords, most companies do not and end up with a bloated email server and multiple copies of a single email with a large attachment.

Luckily, Royal Weddings are few and far between but there are many other major events that generate a lot of interest and email traffic, so we’re not looking at a single event that can cause problems.

This could be a major issue for organizations which depend on email but do not have the ability (or finances) to increase storage space on the server at will. This example is not as far-fetched as it may initially sound and organizations with heavy email traffic flows know exactly how storage is affected by multiple instances of the same email.

The key to resolving this pain point is quite simple – email archiving. In essence, a copy of each email received is stored in a centralized location. This means that the email does not need to be stored on the email server any more thus freeing up much needed space and resources on the server. With single instance storage, for example, of the 200 emails with a 5MB attachment, only one copy is retained but still accessible by everyone in that conversation.

Simple. Yet so effective when managing peaks in traffic volumes because of events like today’s wedding. If you’re using a corporate email account, do think twice before sending large attachments to multiple recipients.

Microsoft does not want you to backup PST files

Email is the internet’s original killer app and if your work depends on email then you are most likely using Microsoft Outlook as your email client. Your emails, tasks, calendar items and contacts are stored in Personal Folders files (.pst). It is therefore very important to backup PST files as they contain such important information. But the truth is it’s not as simple as it sounds.

Microsoft itself provides a tool to backup PST files, called pfbackup. However this tool runs only on old versions of Outlook and Windows. There are other third-party tools to backup PST files but they all suffer from the same set of problems. Some of the tools can back up the PST files only when Outlook is closed. This alone makes it inconvenient for most people – people forget to switch off Outlook at the end of each day just before leaving the office and running the backup. This also has the downside of making only a daily backup, leaving users to face the potential loss of an entire day’s worth of email. Another major problem with tools which back up PST files locally is that email is not available online, or even accessible from another machine – a problem nowadays, as people need the ability to access their email from anywhere.

Online Email Backup

Some PST backup software fixes this issue by backing up email online. This makes the email available anywhere which is certainly convenient. The only problem is getting the PST file online in the first place. For small PST files, backing up online is not a problem but with the ever increasing volume of email, PST files grow to GBs in size. Thus, any time backup software tries to backup the file, they will have to upload the entire PST file. And because every time an email is sent or received the PST file is marked as changed, the entire PST will need to be uploaded again. Clearly, not a workable solution!

PST files are a convenient form of keeping emails for home users perhaps, but for organisations, where email is crucial to their running, PST files just won’t do. Small and medium businesses face ever increasing storage costs on their Exchange server, higher help desk costs to support end-users, as well as need to meet legal or regulatory obligations. Trying to tackle these three goals with PST files is an exercise in frustration – and increasing costs.

The PST Alternative

There is however an alternative to PST files that gives up none of the ease of use, without the downsides. An SME-focused archiving solution will remove the need for PST files by keeping a centralized repository of emails, thus ensuring that all emails are effectively backed up without needing any user intervention. Another benefit of an archiving solution confers is that storage is used much more efficiently through the use of compression and single-instancing of email. This also has the additional benefit of allowing Exchange admins to offload Exchange by letting them set tighter quotas on mailboxes. Of course, for an archiving solution to work, it must offer seamless Outlook integration with the email archiving solution that requires minimal to no end-user training.

Managing PST and making a PST backup, is fraught with costs and hidden productivity losses. An email archiving solution that’s focused on the needs of SMBs will truly keep email secure, but also bring additional benefits to the organisation.

Let’s start with the initial point: what to do if you need to repair PST files. Here are three points:

Inbox Repair Tool

If you have a corrupt PST file, you will see this error message when you try to open it:

Errors have been detected in the file <file_path>. Quit all mail-enabled applications, and then use the Inbox Repair Tool.

Every current version of Outlook comes with a version of the Inbox Repair Tool called scanpst. Scanpst.exe can be found in either drive:\Program Files\Common Files\System\Mapi\LocaleID\scanpst.exe or drive:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office14 (Outlook 2010.) The scanpst.exe tool can scan a PST file for damage, and can recover it in many cases.

OST Crop Tool

When a PST has grown past its maximum supported size, the Inbox Repair Tool may not be able to repair it. If you run the scanpst. exe and it cannot repair the file, you may want to use the OST Crop Tool. This will not recover all of your email, but it will truncate the corrupt file down to a size that may be accessible. You can download that tool from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=B33B1DFF-6F50-411D-BBDF-82019DDA602E&amp;displaylang=en

Third party PST repair tools

The market is full of PST repair tools from several third party sources. Some offer free versions, while others cost money up front. There are too many to list in this short article but a search on Google for ‘repair PST’ will serve you well. Read them carefully, and I strongly suggest making a copy of the PST to be repaired just in case, but that advice is good even if you are using the Microsoft tools above.

But what if you didn’t have to worry about repairing PST files in the first place?

Why do your users have PST files anyway? Is it because they have a small inbox limit, or is it because the system automatically deletes email over a certain age? Whatever the reason, knowing the problems that might arise, requiring PST repair and placing data at risk, is only half of the equation. You do need to provide an alternative and that is where email archiving software comes into play. A good email archiving software eliminates the need for PST files by creating an archive that can be accessed even when Exchange is offline, and that can provide virtually unlimited mailboxes. There are also tools like the PST Exporter that can transfer messages from PST files into the archive, ensuring ongoing access to email and eliminating the risk and performance impact from PSTs on the network.

Good email management includes maintaining access to email. Email archiving software is a great way to accomplish this, and can eliminate the risks and the headaches associated with PST repair.

62.4% of SMEs do not currently use a mail archiving solution – opening the door to a host of issues including: limited email backup and restore, which could lead to data loss; an inability to search for pertinent messages in the event of an audit or eDiscovery request – which could result in costly compliance violations or legal suits; strain on Exchange servers; and storage problems.

These were the results of an independent survey conducted by Opinion Matters, and commissioned by GFI Software, in which more than 200 U.S.-based IT decision makers participated.

The survey also revealed that greater than 38% of the 202 businesses polled do not have an archiving or backup solution of any kind in place, further exacerbating the chances that a network failure could result in a complete loss of critical data stored in email.

Additional results from the survey:

• Two-thirds (66.8%) of respondents were unfamiliar with U.S. regulatory compliance standards regarding email archiving. This number ballooned to over 90% in businesses that rely on only one IT professional.
• 37% said they are required to search for old or deleted emails on a monthly basis, if not more frequently, because of requests from end users, the need to meet compliance requirements, the need to provide copies of correspondence for a lawsuit or audit, or any other requirements.
• 31% of respondents said they would consider a hosted approach to email archiving.

Implementation of a mail archiving solution can enable several email-related necessities, including maintaining an archive of all corporate email correspondence, meeting the growing number of regulations for compliance, eDiscovery and other legislation, significantly reducing the demands on the Exchange server, and managing and reducing the company’s dependency on PST files.

“Email infrastructure is quickly becoming a complex beast, and IT administrators have more factors to consider than ever before – including an increasing level of compliance standards that many are apparently unaware of,” said Walter Scott, CEO, GFI Software. “As the survey clearly indicates, IT managers are routinely required to search for specific emails, and without the automated search capabilities that a mail archiving solution brings, they can take up valuable IT staff time to locate. Critical data stored in email needs to be easily retrievable and accessible, for both day-to-day business concerns as well as for good compliance. Finally, taking the risk of not backing up or archiving key data stored in email can be a very costly gamble depending on the type of data your business is dealing with.”

GFI Software offers both an on-premise solution and a hosted service for email archiving. GFI MailArchiver 2011 is the latest on-premise email archiving software from GFI and now offers automatic archive management and faster, richer search, which makes it even better positioned to tackle the pain points of ever-growing storage costs and email discovery. The recently introduced GFI MAX MailArchive, a hosted service sold through managed service providers, delivers a compliance and disaster recovery solution that requires no additional software installation and delivers a high level of resilience by providing geographic distribution of the message store.

How does email archiving work? Email archiving is a central repository, usually a database, in which message contents and attachments, which would have been automatically extracted from incoming/outgoing emails on the email server, are preserved so that the company maintains a secure record of all its email communication for legal or compliance purposes, or operational reasons. By offloading emails from the email server, expensive storage requirements on the server are reduced, thereby also improving performance. Email archiving also ensures that important and business critical emails are retained for as long as legally necessary even in the event that these emails would have been deleted by employees.

Understanding the value of email archiving

Before discussing how email archiving does this, we shall first evaluate what it involves. Email archiving is a repository in which message contents and attachments, which would have been automatically extracted from incoming/outgoing emails, are securely preserved so that the company would have its records in case of compliance or simply for operational purposes. In this way, the demand for storage space is moderated as the amount of online emails on the mail server would be reduced. Also, email archiving software would ensure that the business has a centralized and accessible copy of all emails – protecting the organization from accidental/intentional deletion of emails by end users, as well as eliminating the need to search for emails manually when requested for litigation support.

Compliance

The first direct advantage with email archiving is that it will help your organization meet compliance. The regulations your organization needs to abide with differ depending on your geographical position and with your clients’ location.

In the United States for example, the following regulations require email archiving as part of their compliance process:

• FDA Title 21 CFR Part 11
• Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP)
• Freedom of Information Act
• Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act
• HFTA (Hedge Fund Transparency Act)
• HIPAA
• FINRA
• Investment Advisors Act
• NASD Rule 3110 and NYSE Rule 440
• Sarbanes-Oxley
• SB 1386
• Securities and Exchange Commission Rule 17a-4 and SEC Rule 17a-3
• The USA Patriot Act

In Germany one can find the GDPDU; while in the United Kingdom email archiving is required for a number of British Standards Institution regulations, for the Data Protection Act of 1998, as well as for the Freedom of Information Act of 2000.

The next logical question is what might be the consequence of non-compliance. To help us understand better, let’s take an actual case such as the Adecco incident. Because its audit trail was not strong enough, massive costs to get its financials approved were incurred and the company got hit badly in the stock market when it was not able to meet its financial filing date.

Fines can be pretty hefty as can be seen in another two cases, the MetLife incident, where the organization was fined $1.2 million by FINRA (Financial industry Regulatory Authority), and the Piper Jaffray case, who was fined $700,000. In both cases, these companies were fined for not meeting their email archiving obligations.

The savings in fines alone, make the deployment of email archiving software an indispensible investment for any organization. Yet this is not the only advantage an organization stands to gain from such a great tool.

Other benefits that come with email archiving

Consider disaster recovery; at the end of the day, email is an integral part of any business – the loss of which can end up costing any organization a lot of money. The email archiving system in itself can be used as an effective backup of the companywide email system, allowing easy recovery should the normal email store suffer data loss. This also applies to cases where, for example, an employee might have deleted important emails accidentally while cleaning their mailbox. Such a system will save the administrator a lot of time when compared to traditional data recoveries which, in case of hardware failures, might end up with substantial costs if data recovery companies are employed – provided that such recovery is even possible as this would depend on the nature and extent of the physical damage.

Another important benefit offered by email archiving is forensics. Email is an important commodity even in a legal context. Email exchanges between parties have been considered by courts as binding contracts, so an organization would want to keep such emails in a secure environment which can provide proof of zero tampering in order to safeguard that proof’s integrity. Email can also contain episodes of an employee’s wrong doings as well as contain proof that exonerates the company of wrong doing that a disgruntled employee might accuse it of. In such cases, a good email archiving solution can provide an effective chain of custody, ensuring such evidence will be admissible in court.

Clearly, email archiving helps organizations comply with regulations, but the deployment of such software also safeguards the business’s interest and helps it be more efficient. While email archiving might not generate a direct return, it will ensure you avoid costly fines as well as make substantial savings that will more than pay for the cost of implementing email archiving in the first place.