Stand-alone Mail Archive

Email discovery and regulation compliance mean that it is necessary for System Administrators to maintain a comprehensive archive of messages sent and received by their organizations. In some situations it is also necessary to maintain a record of intra-organization messages.

Mailtraq has excellent message archiving and message retrieval facilities, however in larger installations the number of messages held in archive can place a burden on the server and reduce overall performance. In this situation it is preferable to place the message archive on a separate machine.

The Archive Passthrough available in the Mailtraq Console at Options | Incoming Mail makes it a straightforward task to create a stand alone email archive for use with your main Mailtraq or other mail servers.

Using the Archive Passthrough

A typical scenario would consist of an Archive Mailtraq being placed between access to the Internet and the main Mailtraq mailserver.

The main mail server does not need to be a Mailtraq – the Passthrough Archive will work with any conventional mail server, however there are configuration advantages in using two Mailtraqs.

The main Mailtraq (or other) mailserver would be set to have a minimal Archive, so that the System Administrator could provide instant access to copy messages, and other day to day tasks. Otherwise, its primary role is to handle message transfer. This configuration is detailed in Passthrough.

The Archive Mailtraq would be set-up with the same domain name(s) as the main mailserver.

The Archive Mailtraq receives all messages for the domains and passes them forward via a static route to the main mailserver. As the messages pass through a copy is taken and placed in a message archive. The main mailserver receives and processes the messages in the normal way.

The main mailserver is configured to send its outbound mail to the Archive Mailtraq, which acts as a conventional smart host for the main mailserver. The outbound messages are also copied to the message archive, before being placed in the Outbox of the Archive Mailtraq. The messages are sent on to their destination either by MX Resolution, or to the ISP's smart host.

Capturing Internal Messages

The message archive routine can be configured to capture internal messages – that is messages between one user and another on the main mail server which would not normally pass through the outbound message router. This configuration is detailed in Passthrough.

Direct Viewing of Archived Items

The Archive Passthrough can be configured to automatically create mailboxes to match local Users, and place copies of all mail to the local-sender's Sent Items folder. This feature makes it a simple matter for compliance officers, or other authorized persons, to use the built-in webmail system (or IMAP) to examine the contents of the sent items folder – in addition to the Find Message tools available.

A similar configuration can be made to copy in-bound messages.Note: Mailtraq is licensed on a per user, single server basis. If you establish a separate installation as an archive for your organization you will need a separate license for that server.