Most companies have never considered the impact one, untraceable e-mail can have on an organisation or an individual's career. With so much information contained within e-mail, it is not surprising that industries and governments are insisting that all e-mail should be retained for legal and compliance reasons. Not only, but a proper e-mail set up solves major problems for systems administrators.
A survey carried out by GFI Software showed that just over 51 per cent of small- and medium-sized businesses (SMB) do not archive corporate e-mail with 33 per cent using their e-mail client and PST files to store e-mail correspondence. This approach to e-mail archiving creates massive problems for administrators who need to search through PST files on individual workstations for e-mails while the unreliability of PST files can prove to be a serious legal liability.
The task of managing e-mail is often split between the system administrator and the end user however relying on end users to backup corporate e-mail is risky to say the least. The optimum solution, which gives administrator full control over corporate e-mail management while allowing users to keep and access old or deleted e-mails, is to use e-mail archiving. There are a number of archiving technologies in use today and solutions that integrate with Microsoft Exchange Server and the Outlook client predominantly use stub files to archive their e-mails. According to an August 2008 paper from Microsoft, the use of stubs does not, however, really avoid the problems that stubbing was meant to prevent.
The use of stub files may address one's e-mail archiving needs but it also creates thousands of small stub messages that affect both Exchange Server's storage capabilities and overall performance. Using Exchange's journaling feature, however, not only eliminates the need for stub files but it also improves performance.
GFI has just issued a white paper that examines these two types of archiving technology and explains why IT administrators should stop using stub files to archive e-mail.
"Over time, an archiving solution working on hundreds of mailboxes will create thousands of small stub messages. Each of these stub messages may be between 2 and 15 kilobytes and still amount to a performance hit since item counts is the primary performance driver for the Exchange store rather than aggregate size," GFI said in the white paper.
GFI provides a single source for network administrators to address their network security, content security and messaging needs. It has offices in the US, Malta, UK, Hong Kong and Australia which support more than 200,000 installations and 10,000 partners worldwide.
A copy of the White Paper is available from: http://www.gfi.com/whitepapers/stubbingwp.pdf.
A survey carried out by GFI Software showed that just over 51 per cent of small- and medium-sized businesses (SMB) do not archive corporate e-mail with 33 per cent using their e-mail client and PST files to store e-mail correspondence. This approach to e-mail archiving creates massive problems for administrators who need to search through PST files on individual workstations for e-mails while the unreliability of PST files can prove to be a serious legal liability.
The task of managing e-mail is often split between the system administrator and the end user however relying on end users to backup corporate e-mail is risky to say the least. The optimum solution, which gives administrator full control over corporate e-mail management while allowing users to keep and access old or deleted e-mails, is to use e-mail archiving. There are a number of archiving technologies in use today and solutions that integrate with Microsoft Exchange Server and the Outlook client predominantly use stub files to archive their e-mails. According to an August 2008 paper from Microsoft, the use of stubs does not, however, really avoid the problems that stubbing was meant to prevent.
The use of stub files may address one's e-mail archiving needs but it also creates thousands of small stub messages that affect both Exchange Server's storage capabilities and overall performance. Using Exchange's journaling feature, however, not only eliminates the need for stub files but it also improves performance.
GFI has just issued a white paper that examines these two types of archiving technology and explains why IT administrators should stop using stub files to archive e-mail.
"Over time, an archiving solution working on hundreds of mailboxes will create thousands of small stub messages. Each of these stub messages may be between 2 and 15 kilobytes and still amount to a performance hit since item counts is the primary performance driver for the Exchange store rather than aggregate size," GFI said in the white paper.
GFI provides a single source for network administrators to address their network security, content security and messaging needs. It has offices in the US, Malta, UK, Hong Kong and Australia which support more than 200,000 installations and 10,000 partners worldwide.
A copy of the White Paper is available from: http://www.gfi.com/whitepapers/stubbingwp.pdf.