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 Email as a form of communication is only increasing. Just last year, in 2020, 306.4 billion emails were sent, and this number will reach a staggering 376.4 billion in 2025. A massive chunk of this number is business emails. Email journaling is one of the ways for organizations to overcome the enormous challenge of tracking all email activity. Do not confuse email journaling with email archiving and backup. It is a different and necessary part of the email archiving process to capture active emails automatically. Related: 5 Effective Data Management Strategies: A Guide to Selecting Email Backup, Archiving or Journaling For your Enterprise In this article, let’s see what is email journaling and why enterprises need it.

What is Journaling Email?

Journaling email is an automated process supported by most email solutions to create a replica of all sent and received emails. This physical copy of the email is a mirror image of the original email, along with the metadata, attachments, and the mail contents. This replica happens in real-time before mail delivery. Since it’s a physical copy captured before delivery, this journaled data cannot be changed or altered in any way, even if users or administrators delete emails from the mailboxes. Email journaling existed before the cloud when emails were journaled into on-premises servers. However, it was challenging to scale as the volume of emails snowballed. With the large-scale adoption of cloud email services, organizations are using the email journaling capability to push mail into an independent cloud archive.

How Does Email Journaling Work?

So, how does email journaling work? It works by becoming a permanent record of the email activity of an enterprise. This record is highly detailed that also includes many metadata elements. Here’s an example: Rajiv sends an email to a customer Gautam at 11:10 am, containing information and an attachment of a catalog of products. He CCs his manager, Gita as well. In the above scenario, the email journal would contain:

  • A metadata record that Rajiv sent an email at 11:10 am to Gautam and Gita, with an attachment and the attachment’s name
  • A copy of the entire email
As you can see, an email journal contains a thorough record of the emails sent and received from your enterprise, and these very email journals get stored in an email archive. Related: Email Archiving, Backup and Journaling: What is the Right Strategy to Secure Email Data?

5 Reasons Why You Need Email Journaling at Your Enterprise

Helps you adhere to your Industry’s Regulations:

Many industry sectors are not regulated and need you to preserve email data for the long term. These regulations mean you must journal and keep a record for a few years based on your sector. Globally, regulations are getting stricter for enterprises’ and consumers’ benefit. For example, the insurance industry requires all insurance companies to journal their emails because of the contractual relationship between them and their customers.

Maintains Legal readiness:

Legal troubles can come knocking on your door through no fault of yours. It could be a disgruntled former employee, an unhappy customer, a business rival, or something beyond your control; legal trouble could come knocking anytime. However, email journaling keeps you safe. Since the records cannot be modified or manipulated and are highly detailed, they hold up as electronic legal evidence in court. This ability to use email as legal evidence is also why mail journaling is becoming an industry norm.

Improves Audit Readiness

Many enterprises need to audit their email solution and email data regularly. Email journaling can speed up this audit process. There are various reasons for an email audit, like

  • understanding and improving the current email strategy
  • refining the email security policies
  • gauging the quality of communications
  • assessing the service quality of the email service provider
  • and more.

But going through each email can be time-consuming. However, email journaling gives you the necessary information, helping you tick off everything on your audit checklist.

Protects Critical Data:

Data can be critical to an organization’s functioning and existence. Your mail solution automatically sends a copy of all emails into an independent email archiving solution using Email journaling. You now have an up-to-date copy of all transacted emails in a safe, durable, secure, centralized storage accessible via a search console. That’s like email data on tap.

Automatically preserve 100% of all emails using Email Journaling

Many enterprises mistake adopting an archiving solution too late and spend much money on storage space for email journaling. These local journals are unwieldy to manage and very difficult to search. Email journaling combined with an email archiving service like Vaultastic captures 100% of all emails in a durable central archive and delivers enterprise-grade data protection at scale and compressed costs. Sign up for a 30-day free trial to experience the power of email journaling for real-time capture of all your email data.

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