GFI MailArchiver 6

Score: 3.5 our of 5
Editor's note: This is a summary of our testing of this product, see a full rundown of how it fared in our testing.

GFI makes a variety of products for the small-to-midsize business (SMB) market to extend the functionality of Exchange. MailArchiver 6 is typical of these tools that are all well integrated with the underlying messaging platform. It's got a simple, straightforward installation and a very easy-to-use feature set. While it requires the usual creation of accounts and enabling of journaling processes, the actual installation is very quick and easy, a condition coupled with its clear documentation that makes this product ideal for the SMB market.

While MailArchiver is inexpensive, it offers quite a bit of functionality, including policy enforcement and support for multiple Exchange servers, supporting Microsoft SQL server as well as the included Firebird database. It offers self-service restores of lost e-mails, allows for flexible retention policies, supports adding user's PST files to the archive, and has good search functions. With auditing tools to track access to archives, good reporting, solid retention policy tools and nice role-based policy tools, MailArchiver 6 offers a lot of functionality at very low prices. It also offers envelope journaling to preserve all the header information in archived messages, and supports Volume Shadow Copy Service to allow backups of the archive without taking the service offline.

While MailArchiver will easily satisfy SMB administrators it lacks the granularity of permissions and ability to control individual features and functionality to the degree that the more enterprise-oriented products such as Symantec, C2C and Mimosa do.

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