September 29, 2009
by sharad
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Using search results

Once you have the search results in front of you, what next?

Well view the message(s) and confirm that you have indeed located the mail you want. If you just needed to lookup some information, then you are done. However, if you want to send the mail to yourself or someone else, then read on.

At the bottom of the search page, a status section shows the number of matches to your query as well as the number of messages you have selected (by clicking on the check box next to each message summary). You can now forward the selected email in the following two ways:

1. Forward

  • Click the Forward button and in the displayed section:
  • Choose a user from the drop-down list or specify an email address to forward to.
  • Enter a subject.
  • Use the “Zip it” option to compress and reduce the size of the mail you are forwarding.
  • Send the mail by clicking forward.
  • The recipient receives mail from the MailVault admin’s email id as specified in Settings > Outbound email.

2. Forward as original

This works just like forward, except:

  • There is no “Zip it” option and the selected messages are sent out individually.
  • MailVault sends the mail to the recipient, while maintaining the orginal sender information in the email. The recipient is able to simply hit reply to respond to the original sender, making this an ideal way to restore a message or two deleted by mistake.

Note:
While an administrator is allowed to forward email to any user or email id, non-admin users have that flexibility only if they are allowed to (Settings > Core >Mail forwarding). The default setting allows non-admin users to be able to forward and forward as original only to themselves.

Delete (admin only)
An administrator is able to delete selected messages, making it useful to remove junk or other messages (like stuff from mailing lists, etc.) that may have made their way into the archive.

Do tell us if there are other ways in which you’d like to use your search results.

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September 11, 2009
by sharad
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Searching through the MailVault email archive

Our approach to MailVault’s search functionality is a little like that of Google Search. Keep it simple and return relevant results.

Most times it should “just work”. When you need to consciously slice, dice and zoom in through the clutter, the following information and hints will help you to make the most of MailVault’s simple search.

Where do we search?

In the email headers (sender, receivers, subject, date), the entire mail body and in the content of some types of attachments (doc, pdf, html).

Search terms

The search query can be made up of single words, multiple words and phrases. Additionally these can be combined using special operators. This is better explained using a few examples.

Exact matches

Search: mail
Will match documents containing the exact word “mail” (not mails, mailing, mailvault, etc.).

Matching any of the terms

Search: mail archive
Will match documents containing the word “mail” OR the word “archive”.

Keep in mind that when we enter multiple words separated by spaces, the default behavior is to match documents that contain any of the words.

Matching all terms

Search: mail AND archive
Will match documents containing the word “mail” AND the word “archive”.

Pattern matching

By default, wildcard pattern matching does not take place. You must explicitly use the characters ? or * to match exactly a single character, or zero or more characters respectively.

Search: mail*

Matches messages containing mail, mails, mailing, mailvault, etc.

Search: mail?

This will match mail and mails, but will not match mailing and mailvault.

Please note that you cannot use ? or * as the first character of any word in your search query. Doing so, will result in an“invalid query syntax” message.

Negating a term

Search: NOT microsoft
Using NOT negates the match. So, NOT microsoft would match all email not containing the word microsoft.

Search: archiv* NOT mailvault

To locate messages that talk about email archiving and don’t mention MailVault (although why would you? 🙂

Matching phrases

Search: “John Doe”
This would match all mail containing the phrase “John Doe”. You can search for phrases, by enclosing the search term within double quotes.

Grouping and building complex queries

Sometimes you may need to fine-tune your query to really zoom in on some information. You could use a combination of the tips above, as well as grouping to form a more complex query. Grouping is done using parenthesis.

Search: (John OR Jane) AND (archiv* NOT mailvault)

Something like this could be used to search for messages that must contain either John or Jane and talk of archiving, but not MailVault.

Using saved searches

If you need to run the same complex searches often, it will soon get tedious to keep typing out long queries. That’s where “Save search” comes in. Once you have fine-tuned your search and gotten the results you want, you can say “Save search”, give it a name and the next time around access it from “My searches”, right next to the search box.

Note: The search terms themselves are case-insensitive (apple, Apple, APPLE will all produce the same results), but the logical operators are case sensitive. You must use OR, AND, NOT in upper-case.

For the occasional times, that you may need to use additional criteria and filters, head over to the “Advanced search” page and use the point and click functionality to build your search query.

May you find the information you seek!

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August 6, 2009
by sharad
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First steps after installing MailVault

There is a book that goes by the name of “What to say, after saying Hello” (or something like that!). A WHOLE BOOK? I guess human beings are complex creatures.

Fortunately, interacting with MailVault isn’t anywhere near as complex. Inspite of all it’s power and flexibility, it is simple to use. For a new setup, on-screen instructions and hints guide through the few basic steps required to get going.

Here is the 1-2-3-4 of configuring MailVault once you’ve installed it.

Logging in

The preset username and password for MailVault is “admin” and “password”. A notice on the login page displays these details and will stay visible on the login page until the admin password is changed.

MailVault Login Screen

Needless to say, it is strongly recommended to change the admin password at the earliest.

Basic configuration

On logging in, the main page (which happens to be the Search page) of the application is displayed. Obviously there is no point in executing a Search right now… 🙂

In the area under the search box, are listed the recommended steps for completing the basic configuration. As you complete each one, the line turns from blue to grey.

MailVault Basic Configuration

Let’s take them in order:

1. Admin’s email id

Specify a valid email-id for the administrator. This will be used as the sender email-id for mail originating from MailVault (alerts, search result forwarding, etc.). Additionally, in case you forget your password, this will be needed to reset your password.

To set the email id, go to Users > User list and edit the Administrator entry.

2. SMTP relay server

MailVault needs a SMTP server through which it can relay mail. Normally this will be your corporate email server.

To set this, go to Settings > Outbound email and fill the relevant information.

3. Your domains

These are used to identify your corporate email from other external mail and can be set at Settings > Core > My domains.

4. Mail sources

MailVault acquires mail using mail sources. Many types of mail sources are supported, but the most commonly used one is POP3.

Head over to Settings > Mail Sources > Retrieve mail from and click on “Add new”.

Once all of these items are configured, MailVault will no longer display these hints on the main Search page.

Basically that’s it. MailVault will now begin the process of archiving your email.

Other stuff

Now while MailVault does it’s stuff you can go ahead and do other things – like adding some users. Feel free to wander through the various settings and check out the available options. If you don’t feel the need to tinker or customize, no worries – most settings in MailVault have sane default values.

All Settings pages have a “guidelines area” on the right hand side which informs you about the purpose of the page’s settings. Additionally, every setting section on a page has it’s own little “help line” at it’s bottom.

Finally, if you really need to you, can request assistance online at the MailVault site; but we assure you, you won’t need an entire book on what to do after installing MailVault! 🙂

Feel free to tell us about things you liked, didn’t like and how we can make your MailVault experience even better…

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July 28, 2009
by sharad
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Installing MailVault

Note: For now, these instructions are for Microsoft Windows platforms only.

Installing and setting up MailVault is easy.

1. Download

Download MailVault and save the installable in an appropriate location on your disk.

2. Install

Double-click the installable to start the installation process. Follow the instructions to complete the installation and to create a shortcut MailVault icon on the desktop. The default installation location isC:\Program Files\DigitalGlue\MailVault.

3. Initial configuration

Start MailVault by double-clicking it’s shortcut icon. On it’s first startup, MailVault needs two pieces of information to be confirmed by you:

  1. The port on which to run it’s webserver (default is 8080)
  2. The location of your mail archive, logs, and other dynamic data (default is under the installed location)
Initial Settings for MailVault

Our advice would be to keep the archive location away from and out of the program installation location – preferably on a separate partition, where there is enough space to hold all the mail you plan to archive.

Once these settings are confirmed, MailVault starts up into normal operation. Simple on-screen hints are available to assist you in completing the basic recommended configuration.

MailVault is now running in demo mode (as indicated on the upper right corner of your screen). In demo mode, more or less all the functionality is available – the limitations being that you will be able to create only two other users and MailVault will archive up to 1000 messages only.

4. License deployment

If you have a license file (evaluation or commercial) – normally emailed to you separately – you can deploy it by copying it into the configuration folder under the MailVault location (in this example under C:\Program Files\DigitalGlue\MailVault\config). You must ensure that the license file is named license.

Restart MailVault. The Demo version on the top right corner of your browser, should now be replaced by your company name.

Test, play, enjoy!

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July 7, 2009
by sharad
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The need for email archival

Corporate email communication continues to grow.

Over the years, email has morphed from a simple and speedy means of communication into a sort of de facto mechanism for just about anything: conversing, exchanging data, managing to-do lists and delegated tasks amongst a whole lot of other things.

Often it is not the appropriate tool for the job, but the fact of the matter is that today email serves as a carrier for:

  • simple dialogue, elaborate discussions
  • data and information
  • presentations, negotiations, sales & strategic deals
  • technical support, customer service
  • mailing lists and so on…

Any which way you look at it, email is valuable!

As the volume of email goes up, how is a corporate supposed to deal with the torrents of email that it consumes and generates daily?

To make things more interesting, consider the following:

  • When an employee leaves, does the organization have convenient access to the employee’s email?
  • When a hard disk crashes or the laptop is stolen, can you quickly and easily regenerate a copy of all email for the employee in question?
  • What happens if a recipient inadvertently deletes an important message (happened with a friend recently) and the sender was unreachable?
  • Can you find and retrieve information from an email exchange that took place a year ago? Two years ago? Five years ago? How easily can you do that? What if you were not part of the original mail exchange?
  • What happens when legislation and law (or your own email policy) requires that you store copies of all email communication for a specified period of time?

These are but a few scenarios of possibly many others that arise in the realm of corporate email usage.

To address these challenges and more, we offer you MailVault.

MailVault is meant to help an organization archive and manage it’s email effectively, productively and securely – while being light, simple to integrate and very user-friendly.

Check out the overview, have a look at it’s current features or download and take it for a spin. We hope you find MailVault as useful as we wish it to be.

Do tell us if there are other needs, scenarios or challenges that you face and would like to see addressed.

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June 29, 2009
by sharad
0 Comments

Introducing MailVault

MailVault is a standalone email archival product, compatible with any standards-based email server.

It offers immediate benefits to organizations aware of and interested in:

  1. Security & compliance
  2. Corporate messaging surveillance
  3. An easy to use backup and restore mechanism for the entire organization’s email

Hello, world… 🙂

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