An archive only matters on the day somebody asks.
And on that day, producing the email is the easy half.
The hard half is proving it is the original. That nothing was altered. That nothing was quietly deleted the week before anyone thought to ask. That the person who left in 2023 has a record too, even though you stopped paying for their mailbox.
Search that takes an afternoon has already failed. So has a retention policy nobody has looked at since it was set.
What happens between sent and searchable.
A copy taken as it happens, not swept up later.
Sequential number, timestamp, digital fingerprint.
AES-256 on ingestion, before it reaches storage.
Body, headers, attachment names and extensions.
Lucene search. Wildcards, Boolean, fuzzy. Seconds.
The fingerprint is the point. It is what turns a pile of stored email into something you can put in front of a regulator and say: this is the whole record, and none of it has been touched.
A backup is not an archive.
Nor is Microsoft 365.
All three are worth having. They answer different questions, and only one of them answers a regulator.
Microsoft 365 archiving is capable, and for some organisations it is enough. The limits above are its published ones: two simultaneous eDiscovery searches, no access to mail on litigation hold, no retention for a leaver without an active subscription, and audit that can be switched off without notification, which is what makes tamper-evidence hard to demonstrate. Microsoft publishes its eDiscovery limits.
The archive watches the people watching it.
An admin account has no access to archive content at all. If somebody needs it for their role, that is a separate, deliberate grant.
Any access by a person who was not a sender or recipient is audited in real time, and your nominated Data Guardians are told.
A reduction needs a second approver holding the Data Guardian role. No single account can quietly shrink what you keep.
The detail, without the meeting.
Ask us something specific →An add-on to Email Security, within the Mail layer. Not a standalone product, and not something you have to take to get Mail.
Indefinite by default. Configurable shorter, deletes automatically at the age you set. No ceiling to negotiate.
Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Exchange, and hybrid estates running cloud and on-premise at once.
IMAP, POP3, EWS and Microsoft Graph. Many-to-one and one-to-many tenants.
Microsoft Teams messages. Outlook calendar items. Folder replication for Exchange and Exchange Online.
Apache Lucene. Wildcard, Boolean, proximity and fuzzy. Attachment names and extensions indexed.
Browser, or the Outlook add-in. Same interface in both.
TLS in transit. AES-256 on ingestion and at rest, applied before storage.
Multi-factor, via ADFS, Microsoft 365, Okta or another OAuth provider.
Restore into the live mailbox, or export as .eml, .pst or .pdf. Per user, or across the whole archive.
Historic mail pulled from live mailboxes. .eml exports from an old archive imported.
Deduplicated, so one copy is held however many people received it.
Managed through a specialist partner. Scoped and reported before anything moves, run in parallel so nothing stops.
Things we would rather you heard from us.
You will find out anyway. It is cheaper for both of us if you find out now.
A backup is a point-in-time copy for disaster recovery. This is a continuous, tamper-evident record for compliance and eDiscovery. A backup cannot prove an email was unaltered before it ran, and it misses anything sent and deleted between two of them. We do not sell backup.
You can read archived mail during a Microsoft 365 outage. You cannot send and receive from it. If riding one out is a board-level requirement, that is email continuity - a different product, and we would rather say so now.
If a message is encrypted by the mail client, it is archived encrypted. We index what is readable - sender, recipient, subject, date, headers - and the message can be downloaded and decrypted to read.
Teams messages are archived. Our CASB shows who is using Slack and Zoom and controls access and file movement. Supervising what is said inside them is a different job, and other products do it properly.