Email archiving is a core business risk issue, not an IT housekeeping task!
When something goes wrong – a dispute, regulatory complaint, audit, cyber incident, or key staff departure – the quality of your email records is often the deciding factor in how serious the impact is.
Why email archiving matters
Email sits at the centre of how most Organisations work. Email messages decide, and document, most key actions. Every quote, approval, instruction, contract and complaint generally passes through an inbox (or two, or three, or more), which makes email one of, if not the most, important set of business records you have.
Strong email archiving supports:
- Compliance: Many Australian rules and frameworks expect you to keep accurate business records for set periods, and email is often the primary record.
- Audit readiness: When auditors ask for proof, archived email gives fast, complete evidence instead of “best efforts” searches in live mailboxes or long forgotten PST files.
- Cyber resilience: Immutable archives protect you from accidental deletion, insider tampering, and some impacts of ransomware by keeping a clean, locked copy of every message.
- Business continuity: If your email platform goes down, you can still search, access, and export critical messages from the archive.
- Legal matters and investigations: Courts, regulators, and investigators now expect organisations to be able to produce email (and its metadata) as part of eDiscovery.
If you rely on staff inboxes, shared folders, or old PST files, you will quickly hit limits when pressure is on. Those approaches may have worked when you were smaller, but they rarely stand up to modern expectations around governance, transparency, and security.
Common email archiving problems
Many organisations still treat email as a personal tool rather than a business record system.
This mindset leads to habits and workarounds that feel convenient day to day but create complexity and risk over time.
Typical issues include:
- Mailbox limits and PST files: Staff export old emails to PSTs on laptops or network drives, which are hard to search, easy to lose, and can corrupt.
- Ad‑hoc backups: Nightly backups capture a snapshot of mailboxes but are not designed for long‑term, item‑level retrieval and eDiscovery.
- Email as a CRM: Leaving every email in a shared folder to be searched for customer details, risking information leakage, data loss and search/replication headaches.
- Inconsistent retention: Some staff keep everything forever, others delete aggressively, leading to gaps and duplication.
- Departing staff: When someone leaves, IT often disables the mailbox and keeps a backup copy somewhere “just in case”, which becomes invisible and inaccessible over time.
- Manual search burden: Internal IT wastes hours running advanced searches across live systems each time there is an audit, complaint, or dispute.
Individually, these problems seem manageable. Together, they slow your teams, frustrate your leaders, and leave you exposed when you most need reliable records.
Our Recommendations
1. Define a clear email retention policy
Your email archiving strategy starts with a practical retention policy. This gives everyone a shared understanding of what to keep, how long to keep it, and where it will live (with the Microsolve Email Archive this step can be skipped - every email is automatically archived, without intervention, silently, seamlessly and effectively).
Three key steps:
- Decide what counts as a business email: Make it clear that any email that shows a decision, approval, instruction, or key communication is a business record and must be retained.
- Set retention periods by content, not by mailbox: Different types of records may need different minimum retention periods under Australian law and guidance.
- Align with privacy and “right to delete” duties: Retain what you are required to, but not longer than necessary, and make sure you can defensibly dispose of data when the time is right.
Keep the rules simple and written: Use plain English and examples so non‑technical staff understand what is kept, for how long, and how it is accessed if needed.
Make archiving automatic: Aim for rules that the system can enforce, instead of relying on every staff member to manually file messages.
For many leaders, this policy work is the hardest part, but it pays off. Once your rules are clear, technology can do the heavy lifting and your people can focus on their core roles.
2. Find a suitable provider
We're 100% biased, so rather than tell you how to select suitable provider, give us a call - we'll answer your questions (without bias!) and help you select a solution that works
3. Inform & train your team
Technology alone will not deliver good email archiving. Your people need to understand why it matters and what is expected of them day to day. When staff see email as part of the official record, not just a personal inbox, they are far more likely to support the policies.
Start by explaining the “why” in plain language. Link email archiving to real risks your organisation faces, such as audits, complaints, cyber incidents, or disputes. Make it clear that good email practices protect everyone: the organisation, individual staff, and the people you serve. Avoid legal or tech jargon and focus on simple ideas like “keeping accurate records”, “being able to prove what happened”, and “protecting sensitive information”.
Training should be short, regular, and role‑specific. Frontline staff may only need a brief overview and a few key dos and don’ts. Team leaders and managers may need more detail on how to search the archive, how to respond to information requests, and when to escalate issues to IT or compliance. New starters should get a simple introduction to email expectations as part of onboarding, so good habits begin on day one.
Finally, make support and ownership clear. Nominate a visible owner for email archiving – often IT working with governance or risk – and tell staff where to go with questions. Provide quick reference guides or intranet pages that summarise the rules and show how to use any search or self‑service tools. When you update your policy or change systems, communicate early, explain the impact in plain English, and invite feedback. Over time, this builds a culture where good email record‑keeping is normal, not a special project.
Why immutable archiving beats PSTs and ad‑hoc backups
An immutable archive locks every email in a tamper‑proof store. This means you can rely on your archive as a single source of truth, even if the original message in someone’s inbox is moved, edited, or deleted.
Compared with PSTs and traditional backups, immutable email archiving offers:
- Write‑once storage: Once captured, emails cannot be altered or deleted, which protects the integrity of the record and its metadata.
- Full capture: The archive ingests every incoming and outgoing message in real time, not just what a user chooses to keep in their mailbox.
- Fast search and secure export: Messages are indexed and de‑duplicated so you can perform targeted searches and export relevant sets of email quickly for auditors, regulators, or lawyers.
- Platform independence: When you move between email platforms, the archive stays stable and accessible, reducing migration risk.
- Reduced endpoint risk: No more PSTs on laptops or USB drives that can be lost, stolen, or corrupted.
This shift from scattered, user‑managed storage to a central, immutable archive is one of the most effective moves you can make for compliance, cyber resilience, and business continuity.
Alignment with Australian regulatory and data protection expectations
While detailed requirements differ, Australian regulations, guidelines, and leading‑practice frameworks share a common message: treat business email as a record and manage it with care. Leaders do not need to know every clause, but they do need to show that their organisation acts responsibly.
Key alignment points:
- Treat email as a business record: Business email should sit in an official record‑keeping system, not just in personal inboxes.
- Retain for required periods: Various federal and state rules define how long certain records must be kept, and email often holds the primary copy of those records.
- Preserve integrity and metadata: For audits and court proceedings, you must be able to show that email content and metadata (dates, senders, recipients, attachments) have not been changed.
- Manage access and security: Retained email must be encrypted, access‑controlled, and protected from unauthorised interference, similar to other retained data sets.
- Enable lawful access and eDiscovery: When there is a dispute or investigation, you need to produce relevant emails in a structured, searchable, and exportable format.
A well‑implemented email archiving solution helps you answer tough questions with confidence: “Yes, we retain what we should. Yes, we can show the history. Yes, we can produce what you need.”
Handling staff departures
Staff movements are a critical point of failure for email records. Departures, restructures, and long‑term leave often lead to hurried decisions about what to do with a mailbox.
A robust email archiving approach should:
- Capture the entire mailbox: With journaling‑based archiving, you retain all messages linked to that account even after the mailbox is disabled.
- Keep access role‑based: Managers, HR, or investigators can access the archive under defined permissions without restoring the mailbox or breaching privacy.
- Avoid one‑off exports: Instead of generating a PST or copying a mailbox to a shared folder, rely on the central archive as the single reference point.
- Support handover and continuity: Key conversations and decisions remain discoverable for successors, even if the original sender has left.
Handled well, staff departures become routine from an information perspective, rather than a scramble to save what might be important.
Supporting eDiscovery and investigations
When a dispute, complaint, or regulator request lands, time matters. Your organisation’s response in the first days often shapes cost, disruption, and reputation.
An effective email archiving strategy should enable you to:
- Search by people, timeframe, keywords, and other criteria across all archived email, not just active mailboxes.
- Preserve metadata so lawyers and regulators can rely on timestamps, recipients, and attachment details.
- Export relevant email sets in common formats for legal review platforms, without disrupting day‑to‑day operations.
- Apply legal holds to freeze relevant email, even if standard retention rules would delete it later.
With the right tools and processes, eDiscovery and investigations become structured, predictable exercises rather than frantic IT projects.
How a managed cloud archive like Microsolve’s helps
A managed, cloud‑based email archiving service shifts much of the risk and workload away from your internal IT team. Instead of building and maintaining complex infrastructure yourself, you plug into a service designed for compliance, performance, and resilience.
A solution like Microsolve’s Immutable Mailbox Archive typically offers:
- Real‑time capture: Every message is captured before it hits the inbox, so nothing slips through user error or deliberate deletion.
- Immutable storage on secure cloud: Emails are encrypted, indexed, and stored in an unchangeable archive on reliable infrastructure.
- Powerful search and self‑service access: Authorised users can quickly search and retrieve email through a web interface, reducing ad‑hoc IT tickets and delays.
- Flexible licensing: Smaller organisations can license every user for self‑service access, while larger ones can focus licenses on compliance officers and executives and apply storage to all mailboxes.
- Simple integration: The archive works across major platforms such as Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace, supporting hybrid environments and migrations.
- Compliance‑ready exports: It is built to support audits, investigations, and legal requests, making it easier to satisfy external scrutiny.
For internal IT, this means less time chasing backups and PST files, and more time supporting strategic projects. For leaders, it means clearer visibility of risk and stronger assurance that email will not be the weak link.
Next steps for your Consideration
You do not need to fix everything at once. A staged, size‑appropriate approach keeps effort and cost under control while still moving you toward best practice.
First Steps
- Define a simple, written email retention statement that applies to everyone.
- Turn off PST exports and rely on a central, immutable archive for all email retention.
- Give managers and owners access to search their team’s archived email under clear rules.
Moving On
- Map your key record types and align email retention with your broader document retention schedule.
- Standardise on a managed cloud archive and phase out old PSTs and legacy backups by ingesting them into the archive.
- Set up role‑based access for HR, risk, and legal so they can handle eDiscovery and investigations without tying up IT.
Enterprise Ready
- Establish formal governance around email archiving, including ownership, review cycles, and audit logs.
- Integrate the immutable archive into broader cyber resilience and business continuity plans.
- Use advanced search, de‑duplication, and export tools within the archive to streamline large‑scale eDiscovery projects.
For all business operations, the goal is the same: make email archiving dead boring, 100% predictable, and absolutely dependable.
When you achieve that, your teams can trust the record, your IT can work more efficiently, and your organisation is better prepared for whatever comes next!
Not sure where to start and what this can delivery for your business - book a quick review call, we're ready to answer your questions!