Postini adds user message archiving to e-mail service

Messaging security service provider Postini this week plans to augment its archiving offering with a feature that lets users store e-mail and instant-messaging communications somewhere other than on the company's servers.

Postini's Personal Archive extends the company's Archive Manager service that was launched last December by giving users a Web-based interface for accessing all of their archived e-mail and IM messages. This means IT administrators can confidently purge messages stored on the mail and IM servers, knowing that archived versions of those messages are immediately available to their users without requiring IT staff intervention, says Andrew Lochart, Postini's senior director of marketing.

"The average user spends 30% of their day in e-mail, creating it, sending it or reading attachments," says Michael Osterman, president of Osterman Research. "Giving end users self-service access [to stored e-mail] is important. Often users go to IT and say, 'I've deleted an e-mail,' and that tends to be very disruptive to IT [to recover], or IT just says, 'Sorry, we don't have the bandwidth to help you.'"

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Messaging security service provider Postini this week plans to augment its archiving offering with a feature that lets users store e-mail and instant-messaging communications somewhere other than on the company's servers.

Postini's Personal Archive extends the company's Archive Manager service that was launched last December by giving users a Web-based interface for accessing all of their archived e-mail and IM messages. This means IT administrators can confidently purge messages stored on the mail and IM servers, knowing that archived versions of those messages are immediately available to their users without requiring IT staff intervention, says Andrew Lochart, Postini's senior director of marketing.

"The average user spends 30% of their day in e-mail, creating it, sending it or reading attachments," says Michael Osterman, president of Osterman Research. "Giving end users self-service access [to stored e-mail] is important. Often users go to IT and say, 'I've deleted an e-mail,' and that tends to be very disruptive to IT [to recover], or IT just says, 'Sorry, we don't have the bandwidth to help you.'"

When deleted e-mail contains information that must be archived per regulations, the situation becomes more difficult, Osterman adds.

A number of hosted e-mail security providers offer archiving as part of their services, including MessageLabs and Microsoft, via its FrontBridge acquisition last year. Osterman notes that because message archiving represents only one portion of an enterprise's archiving needs, there are dozens of vendors focused on providing a wide range of archiving services for all types of corporate information.

However, it makes most sense for the messaging-security providers to offer companies message archiving, Osterman says. "If the vendor is already touching the mail stream for anti-virus and anti-spam, archiving is not much of a stretch," he says.

When Postini first launched its Archive Manager service late last year, the company assumed customers would want archiving for document retention and regulatory or legal compliance, Lochart says. But customers quickly began asking for a way to use Archive Manager that would take the stress off of internal mail and IM servers that results when the message stores become overloaded, he says.

"Users are making e-mail their universal filing cabinet, so there's another reason to archive messages [besides compliance], and that's to offload them from primary mail servers that are slowing down to a crawl," Lochart says. "Exchange and Domino weren't built to be the repository of some of the most important information in a business."

Archive Manager stores all of a company's e-mail and IM messages at its facilities and indexes them so they can be easily searched, but only by the customer's authorized IT administrators. Personal Archive opens that archive access to any employee, using the same Web interface that Postini customers use to manage their spam quarantine folders and white lists, Lochart says. No one has the authority to delete e-mails from the archive, but messages are automatically purged after whatever time period specified by the customer, usually between one and nine years.