Need to archive email both sent and received

[glricht]

I have an SMB customer with about 8 users currently using Outlook 2010 for their email using a custom domain hosted by 1&1. They have two domains, one for general business use and a 2nd used for by a separate division of their company, e.g. jones.com and jones-special.com. Things have been working fine for almost ten years.

The CEO called last Friday and said they want an archival copy of all emails sent TO any email address on jones-special.com and all emails sent FROM any email address on jones-special.com.

Although they take backups each night that doesn't address the situation where an email is received at 10am, a reply sent at 10:15am and then: the received email is deleted from the Inbox, the sent email is deleted from the Sent folder and the Deleted Items folder emptied. They're currently using POP, but switching to IMAP wouldn't help. I talked to 1&1 and was told they don't have an email archival service that would work here.

Last year one of our law office clients switched to O365 Business Edition and went with the E3 plan because they needed the archival function available with E3. I mentioned it to the CEO, but the resources, time and money are way overkill.

I've come up with a method to create an archive of emails sent TO email addresses on jones-special.com (using forwarding), but that doesn't address emails sent FROM email addresses on jones-special.com. Setting up an Outlook rule to create duplicate copies of sent emails would work, but that would be fairly easy to circumvent by the user.

Anybody have ideas? Or know of an email provider that allows auto-archiving of received/sent email?

 

[TurricanII]

Sounds like you need one of many online mail archivers, namely Max Mail or Mimecast. You change the MX to deliver inbound email to the filter first, then it passes email in to your mailboxes after taking a copy. Similarly you relay outbound email through it.

If they want it very cheap, I would look for a free SMTP relay server that can sit on a server in the office and forward a copy of outbound emails to your 'archive' mailbox.

 

[PodnutzPro]

This is easily done with any version of Exchange hosted locally or any Office 365 account using journaling. I have set this up a few times and it captures all messages sent or received, externally as well as any internal messages.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

He has the needs for business class e-mail and features...but sounds like he doesn't want to pay for it...client wishes to stay on residential grade e-mail (pop/imap).
One of those situations where you can only suggest upgrading to proper business grade products like O365...and shrug your shoulders when they won't do it.
I wouldn't spend time trying to design a mickey mouse setup on residential grade e-mail...cuz he won't pay you for your time anyways.

If an O365 subscription was too much for him...a proper archiving solution surely will be too. Lots of storage and costs involved.

 

[nlinecomputers]

Sometimes you just have to say to do X will cost Y and you know of no other way to get it done. It's the cost of doing business. Lawyers around here charge $400/hr. I have no sympathies with claims that it is too expensive.

 

[fencepost]

And as a side note if they don't end up changing to something actually business-class - whatever option goes in is likely to be from an outside vendor that also does spam filtering. Telling people in the office about the new spam filtering is the way to cover the changes in email handling.