From Ryan Groom,
Your Guide to Business Security.
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Ask anyone what the most important application for a business is today and I bet the majority of them say email. Email has risen from a little message exchange program to a mission critical component for many businesses. In today’s fast paced business world, a company cannot afford to lose a client because of a lost quote or blow off a client meeting because you can’t find the email meeting request. Add compliance to this and the issues compound. Now companies must keep email for a number of years and be able to reproduce it.

A company I was doing business with was recently switching over to Exchange 2007 and they required all of the above mentioned features...including looking after users old PST files (The Personal Storage Table files that hold all of the mail in Outlook). I started looking for a solution. Having used a other GFI software packages in the past I decided to give GFI Mail Archiver, a try.

GFI Mail Archiver does just what the name implies, it allows you to mange and archive your email. More importantly for this job, it allowed me to move away from PST files and provide a mechanism to save the company’s old email. Setting up GFI Mail Archiver is actually very easy (as long as you have Exchange 2007 setup first). Let’s have a look.

Installation

Installation is straight forward and simple to complete. The first question you need to consider is where do you want to install GFI Mail Archiver. If you have a single Exchange server you can install the program directly on the Exchange server. If you have multiple servers, you will need to install the program on a server that has access to all of the other Exchange servers. Whichever machine you install it on, ensure IIS (Internet Onformation Service - Microsoft’s web server) is installed as well. The requirements are fairly low. With that decided you need to specify a database. GFI Mail Archiver comes with Firebird DB (an open source database) or you can use Microsoft SQL Server. I much prefer Microsoft SQL Server as I have it set up already. With that decided, we simply run the installation executable. You will be prompted for the License Key which you will enter and that is it – you have installed GFI Mail Archiver. Let’s look at the configuration utility.

Configuration

Once launched the application appears in an explorer type view to allow you to access the major components of the product. There are a number of components that you can look at ranging from general settings to archive stores to access control. Looking at each of these is beyond the scope of this document, but be aware that the interface is easy to navigate and very simple to use. To get up and running simply fill in the required information in the general settings (such as email addresses and SMTP servers) and save.

From there you simply choose exactly which emails you want to archive (incoming, outgoing, internal) and which Exchange servers you want to monitor. A look at the archive stores allows you to see at a glance the database being used, access permissions and connection settings to the configured Microsoft SQL Server database. Remember if you don’t have Microsoft SQL Server, you can use the built in Firebird database instead. The manual contains information for both types of setups. Now that it is setup, the ease of use is the next point we should take a look at.

Ease of Use

Having a great product is one thing, having a great product that people can use is another. Fortunately, GFI Mail Archiver falls into the latter category. For the average user to access GFI Mail Archiver, they simply point their favourite web browser to the web server that was setup with GFI Mail Archiver. Ask your administrator for the URL. Once you land on the page you will have access to a panel very similar to the configuration utility, only a whole lot less complicated.

From here users can browse their archived email threads (called conversations in GFI lingo) and view any email stored in the system to which they have permission to view. The beauty of this approach is that you can be anywhere and just have to access the website instead of having to connect to the Exchange server or load up Outlook. If you come across an old email that you do decide you want to have back in your Outlook folder, you can have GFI Mail Archiver email you the message or save it to a disk. Even if the old email contains an old word document you need, GFI Mail Archiver allows you to download the attachment to your local system.

The other feature I liked is that if you have been given permissions on the GFI Mail Archiver server, you can actually browse other people’s archived email. I would not recommend just walking in one day and start perusing other’s email as this may violate corporate policy (as well as common decency), but it does allow a registered user to look at the archives of a terminated employee to try and find lost documents or email conversations. The search capabilities of GFI Mail Archiver are quite in depth and allow you to search by a number of criteria including size, title, sender, receiver, etc. I could go on in depth about the search as there are many facets to it. A little playing around will have you up and searching in no time. You can even incorporate all of the features of the website into Outlook if that suits you better.

Auditing

GFI Mail Archiver also helps organizations achieve compliance by archiving email using the Microsoft SQL Server database. This ensures that organizations can keep email untouched for auditing purposes as required. This can be configured through the configuration Interface by an administrator as required.

Conclusion

With email being such an integral component to any organization, it is important to be able to archive and retrieve all email. Not just for auditing reasons, but for the continued success of a business. GFI Mail Archiver is a simple to configure and simple to use and a welcome addition to any corporate email policy.