There is the email archiving you do to meet various compliance mandates, and then there is the rest that everyone does. Most people do this kind of email archiving manually through their Microsoft Outlook folders.

This is not the best approach. A recent Gartner report on email archiving points out: “Demand for email active archiving products and services continues to escalate, as pure financial industry compliance considerations are being replaced by the broader market requirements for message retention, mail server management, and legal discovery support.”

“The email archive, for better or worse, has become a rich trove of business knowledge that, if mined and managed effectively, becomes a powerful business tool or, if allowed to run rampant without any controls, can be a litigation minefield. (See wiredFINANCE, Mar. 17, “Delete Data to Minimize Litigation Costs.”) As Gartner says, “Most organizations should be doing some kind of email archiving.”

Email has emerged as one of the leading applications; in many organizations it is a mission-critical application. Some departments — marketing, sales, customer service, as well as management across all business units — can barely function anymore without prompt access to email.

Email archiving is a system for collecting and storing email messages and whatever attachments accompany them. The system needs fast retrieval of messages; fast, flexible, comprehensive searching; and high reliability. That means backing up the email archive like any other important data. The system should be highly automated to ensure that every email, sent or received, is captured and archived and transparent to users.

Email systems can be expensive. Certainly the big archive players — notably EMC, Symantec, CommVault, Mimosa — offer systems that can be quite pricey, especially at the enterprise level. Increasingly, email archiving products include bells and whistles like antivirus, antispam, and deduplication.

Companies have two basic choices for email archiving:

(1) License and purchase a system to run in-house.

(2) Turn it over to an online application service provider in the cloud.

The in-house option entails all the costs and hassles of setting up and running a major IT system. With the online option, you dump a lot of the IT headaches on the service provider.

“For many organizations and companies, managed e-mail archiving services can deliver a fast, relatively painless solution with no initial infrastructure investments,” says Gartner. The Enterprise Strategy Group, Milford, MA, another analyst firm, recommends the online service provider approach for businesses with 1,000 or fewer mailboxes.

Online managed service providers include: LiveOffice, Global Relay, Google, and Smarsh. Even Microsoft plays in hosted email archiving through its acquisition of FrontBridge. Microsoft Exchange is the dominant email system, but trying to archive messages within Exchange itself creates serious problems, including slow performance

Online email archiving typically is sold and priced per user/mailbox per month. Rates I’ve seen run $8 per mailbox or less. Volume discounts are common.

So, if compliance and litigation issues haven’t already driven you to email archiving ,consider adopting it generally for everyone. With the rise of cloud computing, the options can only get better and cheaper.