E-mail Archival Frequently Asked Questions
- What is Email Archival?
Email Archival extends the Exchange mailbox email quota by using cost-effective storage hardware and software. Each STAFF will have up to 5GB of email quota comprising of 500MB (of primary quota from Exchange) and 4800MB (from Email Archival).
Email Archival frees up your Exchange mailbox by automatically moving and archiving the older mails to the secondary storage during off-peak times. This activity is transparent and seamless to you and your archived mails are directly accessible on the fly from Outlook client and Webmail. (back to top)
- Why can't we just increase the mailbox quota for Exchange instead of using Email Archival?
On backend, Microsoft Exchange is proficient in handling dynamic day to day information, making it the best choice as a PIM (Personal Information Managment) productivity tool. However for long term, large scale management of data, Email Archival provides the better and cost-effective solution of an "unlimited" mailbox by freeing up space in your Exchange mailbox. This is accomplished by moving and compressing the older mails to secondary storage and replacing the original mails (including attachments) with shortcuts. (back to top)
- How do I access my archived mails?
Your archived mails is directly accessible from your Outlook client and Webmail, in office or from home as you normally would. The other modes of access will still need to be further tested out for interoperability.
For personal copies of Outlook client in home PC or personal laptop, you'll need to install the Email Archival plug-ins to access archived mails. Please follow this link for the installation instructions. (back to top)
- What items in my mailbox are being archived?
Only emails/items in the following folders types are archived-enabled:
Please note that User Created Folders are folders created in Outlook/Webmail. These folders reside on the Exchange servers. These are NOT your Personal Folders or PST files. PST files reside on your local drive or a mapped online network drive. (back to top)
- How does Email Archival work?
Email Archival archives emails according to the following rules as shown below.
The strategy is to keep your Exchange mailbox below its size limit to keep a percentage of "free" quota always available so you can continue to send, receive new messages and items. (back to top)
- What is the typical mail size of an archived mail?
It averages between 3 to 4 Kilobytes as archived mail display only the first 1000 characters of the original email contents or text
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- With Email Archival, it seems I do not need to do housekeeping for my mailbox anymore!
No, your statement is over zealous. Your mailbox quota (in Exchange) is made up of the following folders too:
Email archival only helps to keep your Exchange mailbox quota below its size limits - giving you that "extended" quota of additional 4800MB. However, items or emails in the unarchived folders like Deleted Items, Junk Email, etc. still need to be housekept/emptied from time to time.
Moreover when your Email Archival quota of 4800MB limit is reached, you'll need to empty some of these archived mails to make way for more disk space too. (back to top)
- All this while I have been saving my mails to PST file(s). With Email Archival, it seems I do not need to keep them in PST anymore!
This statement is not entirely true. Some users we know of keep large amount of PST files on their local computers or mapped online network drive. Email Archival is not the fix-all solution as it only helps to keep your Exchange mailbox below its size limits - giving you that "extended" quota of an additional 1000MB. (back to top)
- How do I distinguish between an archived email from a normal email in my mailbox?
Both in Outlook or Webmail, archived mails are easily identified from the short-cut icons as shown below. Also archived mails display only the first 1000 characters of the original email content.
To read an archived email complete text, simply double-click on it as you usually would when opening any emails. The full contents of the email will then be retreived from the Email Archival storage on the fly. You can then choose to reply to the sender, cc list, etc. or forward it to other contacts as you like.
Please note for personal copies of Outlook client in home PC or personal laptop, you'll need to install the Email Archival plug-ins to access archived mails. Please follow this link for the installation instructions. (back to top)
- Why can't I see the full/original contents of the archived mails in my Outlook?
If you double-click on archived mails, the full contents of the email should be retreived on the fly. If the opened mail is still displayed as below, it is likely the Outlook plug-in has not been installed on the computer.
To install the Email Archival plug-ins please follow this link for the installation instructions. (back to top)
- Why am I unable to restore my archived messages?
When your mailbox messages are archived by Enterprise Vault, the original content will be moved to a separate location and replaced with a shortcut [
].
From time to time, you may wish to bring the full message back to your mailbox (e.g., for housekeeping purposes) by performing a restore operation from the toolbar [
]. Sometimes, users attempting to restore their archived messages may notice that the operation seems to be 'stuck' in a pending state [
]. This is likely due to the fact that they do not have enough available space remaining in their mailboxes for the operation to complete successfully.
If this happens to you, you can rectify it by selecting all messages that show the 'pending restore' icon [
] and then select 'cancel operation' from the Outlook toolbar:
After the messages have returned to the original state [
], make room in your mailbox by deleting or moving unwanted email messages and try to restore the messages again. This time, however, restore only a few messages at a time, and once the operation is completed (i.e., returned to a 
icon), move the messages to another storage location (e.g. a personal folder or PST) so that you'll have space available to restore additional messages if required.
Note: if you delete archived messages (identifiable by the 
icon) it will also be deleted from the server and the message will no longer be available. (back to top)
