This is an e-mail archiving system that looks good and simple, but ISPs would want just one more feature.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [May 31, 2007]

Based in Shreveport, La., with development offices in Washington and Arizona, ArcMail Technology specializes in one product: appliances that handle e-mail archiving for small businesses.

Initially, such companies pitched compliance (with HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley, or other laws) when selling their product. ArcMail's presentation lists fines paid by companies for failing to store e-mails, Philip Morris fine $2.75 million, Morgan Stanley fined $15 million, and Bank of America fined $10 million. But those companies were fined for failing to indict themselves. Philip Morris "lost" evidence showing that it knew that tobacco causes cancer, and Morgan Stanley and Bank of America could not locate evidence that they'd participated actively in Enron's off balance sheet fraud. The fines paid were far less than the companies would have paid had they been able to locate the evidence sought and had they been convicted. In addition, no staff at the companies went to jail.

Ray Bingham, CEO of ArcMail, says that companies like his have changed their sales pitch. "Compliance is like insurance. A business might need it or might not. But knowledge management, storage management, business continuity planning, and, most importantly productivity improvement are needs businesses respond to."

Bingham points us to an article on a Radicati Group report (available for $2,500) on the e-mail archiving market that says that only 14 percent of companies use e-mail archiving now but 70 percent will be using it by 2011.

The report says that as e-mail usage grows, and as the size of attachments grows, even basic e-mail storage is becoming a burden for some businesses.

Underground e-mail storage
Bingham says that most companies fail to see the costs of e-mail storage because much e-mail storage is "underground" e-mail storage.

Corporate users can keep their e-mail in one of four ways:

1. Keep everything. Doing so overloads the mail server or the desktop client. If the mail is retained on the server, it raises license costs. In addition, keeping everything increases search and backup times.
   
   
2. Create desktop folders. Folders are difficult to search and inaccessible to the rest of the organization. They can be lost. They can create a security risk if a laptop is lost or a desktop is compromised.
   
   
3. Delete mail. If users have to delete their mail, the organization can lose valuable knowledge.
   
   
4. Rely on backup tapes. Tapes, Bingham says, are not a good option. "They are difficult to use, time consuming, and data retrieval is sometimes impossible."

The product
The big box of e-mail storage, with massive RAID-redundant hard drives (in various configurations depending on the model), is called ArcMail Technology Defender.

Bingham calls the GUI simple and elegant (see image below).

The box uses Envelope Journaling. "Defender gets a copy of each e-mail," says Bingham. "It indexes the header information, text, and the text of any attachment and then compresses and stores the e-mail. This enables fast search."

So, for example, if you were searching on a keyword such as "Bingham" or "Goldman", the engine would simply go to the index instead of searching all e-mails at the time of the request.

The keyword database does take up space. Bingham says the database consumes as much space as Defender gains from compressing e-mails.

He's eager to tout the advantages of a box over software. "The appliance is better. There's no integration. You just put a box in and turn journaling on at your mail server."

He adds that many small businesses don't have the gigabytes or terabytes of storage that Defender provides, an extra value to such customers.

In order to be compliant with data discovery rules, e-mail is stored as read only and cannot be deleted or changed. Old e-mails stored in other formats (or on user desktops) can be imported into Defender. Defender stores all inbound, outbound, and internal e-mail.

Pricing and availability
ArcMail Technology Defender is available now in a variety of models ranging in price from $2,999 to $34,999:

—End