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Understanding Message Archiving Concepts

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This article refers to the Barracuda Message Archiver release 5.0 or higher, except where noted.

Policy Monitoring

Many organizations need to keep track of organizational policy violations, and to be alerted when violations occur. Policies can look for personally identifiable information inside messages, look for message containing specific words identified as foul language, and identify messages sent to and from various sites classified as non-business sites.

The Barracuda Message Archiver includes a set of standard policies that are updated as needed by Barracuda Central, and distributed via Energize Updates. These standard policies allow you to easily create your own policies to fit the needs of your organization. You can configure alerts to go out whenever a policy violation is detected, and reports are available to summarize new policy violations and to detect any that are found amongst the messages stored in the archive.

Auditing

Organizations frequently use outside firms to perform an audit of company records. With the Barracuda Message Archiver, you can provide an independent auditor complete access to all data. Using the Auditor role, there is no need to add the user directly to the official directory structure, nor is there need to assign the user administrator-level privileges to the entire network.

Specific individuals or accounts can be assigned special audit privileges on the Barracuda Message Archiver including the ability to create and monitor policies, and to flag messages as needed.

Stubbing

Stubbing refers to the replacement of the often sizable attachments in messages with "stubs" that contain a link from which an attachment can be retrieved, thus eliminating the need to store attachments on the mail server where they take up valuable disk space. Messages that have stubs in place of the actual attachment can still be read, forwarded, and otherwise acted upon in the same manner as messages with embedded attachments.

The Barracuda Message Archiver supports stubbing with Microsoft Exchange mail servers, and offers Archive Search for Outlook that allows users to easily stub or unstub their own messages containing attachments.

Exporting Messages

Messages found to be in violation of organizational policy often need to be gathered together for easy presentation. Once a search has located the messages you want to export, the Barracuda Message Archiver can export either a .zip file containing .eml versions of the selected messages, or a .pst file. For details, go to the Basic > Search page in the web interface, and click Help.

Alias Unification

Each user typically has only one account on the email server, but may have multiple email addresses (usually variations on their initials and names) that they also receive. These aliases are resolved by the email server using protocols such as LDAP so that messages addressed to an alias are actually delivered to the appropriate email account.

The Barracuda Message Archiver unifies the primary account with all of its known aliases so that a user has archive access to all messages received by that user regardless of the "Send To" address on the message.

Archived Data Backup

The Message Store of the Barracuda Message Archiver should be backed up just as you would back up your data on any other data storage device. For details, see How to Back Up Your Archived Data.