December 17, 2014
by sharad
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Release: MailVault v4.1.0

MailVault v4.1.0 is available.

This significant release features a revamped user-interface with improved usability and actions.

The UI has been made responsive across various screen sizes, so you can access MailVault from various devices – your desktop, laptop and tablet – all with a clean and convenient user-experience.

Additionally, the core libraries have been updated for better performance, and some minor fixes and enhancements have also been done.

Note:

  • This release uses Java 7. While Windows users will automatically receive the Java update, Linux users will need to ensure that Java 7 is installed before the upgrade can succeed. Don’t worry, MailVault will detect this, inform you and not allow the upgrade to proceed.
  • All users may need to clear their browser cache.

You can upgrade your MailVault installation by going to:

Settings > Core > Auto updates and click on Check for updates

Then simply follow the on-screen instructions.

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August 12, 2013
by sharad
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Monitoring MailVault’s email storage efficiency

We already know that organizations using MailVault for email archiving and eDiscovery, are benefiting immensely from the storage efficiency of MailVault’s intelligent archive store.

Just how much that benefit is, is now clearly visible in the new Storage reports, available in MailVault since version 3.4.0. (To view the reports, from the main navigation bar, go to Reports > Storage).

The storage efficiency is tracked over four time-periods:

  • Today
  • Last 7 days
  • Last 30 days
  • Last 365 days

For each of these, the volume of email processed and the disk space utilized is tracked. The reports show the total email received, deduplicated, filtered and finally archived.

Let’s take a look at the storage report from an actual MailVault installation, for about 100 users, over a 5-week period.

For today and 7 days, the storage is displayed in MB, whereas for 30 days and 365 days, it’s shown in GB.

To conclude the above example, email that would have otherwise occupied 20.50 GB, took up only 4.71 GB in MailVault’s archive. In other words, by using MailVault, this organization saved over 77% of disk usage.

In summary, although disk capacities are increasing and the cost per GB is decreasing, the sheer volume of email that an organization deals with today is increasing. That, compounded with the fact that email will need to be stored for several years, with easy retrievability, quickly adds up to a formidable challenge on the storage front.

A challenge, that we are happy to say, MailVault is geared to handle!  🙂

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November 9, 2011
by sharad
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IMAP Archiving (or Email Archiving for IMAP)

What is IMAP?

IMAP (or IMAP4) stands for Internet Message Access Protocol and allows an email client to access email on a remote mail server. Along with POP3, it is a popular email access and retrieval mechanism.

IMAP was designed basically with the idea of a ‘remote mailbox‘, which means that user’s would be able to leave their email on the server and connect to it from anywhere.

Some of the advantages of IMAP include:

  • Multiple simultaneous connections to a single email box: This means users may share an email box, or a single user may have multiple devices accessing the same box at the same time.
  • Maintaining state of messages on the server side: Has the message been read, replied to or marked for deletion? An IMAP server keeps track of these, so that when you read a mail while accessing the mailbox from your notebook and then later connect using your mobile phone, you will see this mail as already read.
  • Partial message fetch: A user can choose to see just part of a message on demand.
  • Connected and disconnected modes of operation – the connected mode allows for better response for very large messages and mailboxes.
  • Other: There are other features like basic server-side searches, moving email between mailboxes, etc.

With servers becoming more powerful and the proliferation of smart mobile devices (cell phones, tablets, notebooks, etc.), an increasing number of users are using IMAP for everyday email.

IMAP archiving

If you are using an IMAP email account, the chances are that you have a very large mail box. While your service provider may give you a large amount of disk space, sooner or later it will get exhausted. That’s one reason to backup or archive your mail box. Even if you had an unlimited amount of space, it’s still probably a good idea to backup your email – after all it does contain valuable information.

MailVault makes it trivial to backup and archive IMAP email accounts. An organization can centrally store all corporate communications. It can derive further benefit from huge space savings, thanks to the email de-duplication process and compressed storage, which means that even if there are many copies of an email, only one will be retained and stored in a compressed format. Multiple users can access the email and based on privileges, users can only see their own mail, thus ensuring privacy.

MailVault is an easy to use mail archiving software that makes IMAP archiving a breeze.

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August 31, 2011
by sharad
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Mail Archiving: Why your Organization needs it?

More and more people are becoming aware of ‘email archiving’ practices. Email archiving is the process of using a software application (or service), which normally in conjunction with an email server provides a way to centrally store all of an organizations email communications. It also provides a way to search through the archived email messages quickly and easily.

Email, email and more email…

So why would an organization need mail archiving in the first place?

While there can be numerous reasons for a company to use email archiving, here are four important ones:

1. Loads of email
Regardless of the physical size of an organization, if uses a lot of email for business (and these days who doesn’t) then that email contains a lot of valuable information and must be treated as such.

As the amount of email (and information) grow over time, it can get overwhelming to manage properly. New architectures and methodologies are needed to store, manage, search and use this information. Email archival systems are build for this.

2. Compliance
Companies in various industries, especially those in the financial, healthcare, education, and government fields are faced with the task of handling compliance needs concerning data and email management.

With the amount of email increasing exponentially, it’s getting harder to use older methods effectively to monitory and organize all this data. Email archiving systems are very helpful here.

3. Storage & disk space management
Once again the increasing communications eat away at available disk space. Archiving solutions use techniques like single-instance storage (eliminating duplicate email) and compression to save space.

Additionally, a sophisticated email archiving solution will provide other means for space management. For instance email filters can prevent unnecessary email from getting into the archive in the first place; andretention policies allow the organization to set different lifetimes to different types of email (eg. Newsletters to be retained only for 3 months, etc.)

4. Increasing your IT Productivity
In today’s competitive world, an organizations workforce and especially it’s IT department already have a heavy workload. Worrying about email backup and managing long term email storage justs adds to everyone’s woes. By using email archiving software, an organization can automate the collection and storage of email.

A smart email archiving solution allows your IT team to focus on other operational tasks, lowers IT help desk costs by allowing end users to use self-service and allows you mail server to perform better by taking away email storage responsibilities from it.

It doesn’t matter how small or large your organization may be, chances are, you need email archiving.

Note: For a more end-user oriented and an everyday-centric view point of the benefits of email archiving, do have a look at: The need for email archival.

Picture credit: With thanks to Ramberg Media Images.

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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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