Enterprise Email Archiving from MessageSolution is an archiving system that uses MySQL rather than Microsoft SQL Server. It offers granular control over administrative and auditor rights, which can be granted to many different types of users.
Score: 4 out of 5Editor’s note: This is a summary of our testing of this product, see a full rundown of how it fared in our testing.
Enterprise Email Archiving from MessageSolution is an archiving system that uses MySQL rather than Microsoft SQL Server. It offers granular control over administrative and auditor rights, which can be granted to many types of users. Also among its strengths is its support for a wide variety of mail servers beyond Exchange.
The install is relatively simple as the necessary MySQL and Tomcat installation is done automatically, requiring no specialized knowledge other than clicking the ‘continue’ box. Creating the necessary administrative accounts used by the archiving server to pull messages from the accounts to be archived and enabling journaling is all well documented in the manual, as is the option for enabling envelope journaling. EEA supports several methods of drawing data from the Exchange server, including WebDAV (the default), as well as IMAP and POP3.
MessageSolution uses a relatively flat file system for storing archived messages – one file per day for all archived messages, and another file per day for attachments. These conditions mean that if you follow the recommendation to constrain searches by approximate dates, things go very quickly. However, searches of a mail store with 10 years worth of messages and no date specified took quite a bit longer than some of the other systems that use a more powerful database server, requiring 15-20 seconds rather than the one or two seconds observed with other systems for the same task. With dates within a year of the date of the message, search times were very short.
EEA includes reporting and auditing tools, but these are strictly oriented towards archiving and searches, and offer no specialized tools for compliance- or retention-oriented tasks.
EEA has a relatively simple network architecture, which oriented towards a smaller e-mail environment rather than a large enterprise. For instance, the product’s database is installed on the same machine as the archiving server, which would limit scalability in a large environment.
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