Have an interesting situation regarding email archiving. One of my clients is a technical company that performs scientific surveys for their clients. They currently just use a mish-mash of different POP3 clients to POP their mail from their hosted domain, and as a result all the emails related to any one project or client of theirs may be scattered among many machines. I am moving them to some sort of email server hosted in-house, probably Exchange (but I'm open to other options) so we can consolidate all the emails related to a given project into one shared folder.
However, they can't have a standard email archiving policy whereby emails over NNN days old are archived by the email system. They need the ability to segregate and archive all the emails related to any one project so that when they back the project up, either to several DVDs or to several external HDDs, the project-related email goes with the data and reports. The email will need to be archived in such a way that when an old client comes back in a few years, we can pull the archives and restore them to usability, or at least to easy readability. This happens from time to time, they're actually looking at re- opening at least one 15-year-old project right now. At the same time for legal protection down the road IMHO they need a standard email aging and archiving policy such that emails not related to any project are discarded after a certain amount of time. Company has 50-80 employees in 3 offices and a couple of remote workers, plus field crews that will be remoting in, either via VPN or via some sort of terminal services setup. Anyone have any experience with an email system that can handle something like this? Can this be done with Exchange, especially the archiving of all emails related to a project? Angus P.S. what are the legal requirements WRT archiving all the spam that comes in if you run your own mail server in-house? Is it better to have an offsite spam filter that you check remotely so you don't have to archive this cr*p, or can you just discard it safely and not run into any legal issues should lawsuits arise? This is important to the company as some significant amount of their work is either environmental or done under the umbrella of working for a lawyer who is working for the ultimate client. If something is filtered offsite, we can certainly not worry about archiving it. ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
