Make Protecting Your Organization from Data Loss Your Top Priority
Email archiving isn’t just a best practice – it can be a legal necessity. Organizations across industries face stringent compliance requirements for retaining electronic communications, from SEC regulations in finance to HIPAA in healthcare.
Consequences of Overlooking Email Journal Archives
Despite its critical importance, email journal archiving remains one of the most overlooked and commonly mismanaged components of IT infrastructure. When journaling fails silently, the consequences can be devastating: lost evidence, compliance gaps, reputational damage, and potentially millions of dollars in legal liability.
How Does Email Journaling Work?
Email journaling is the foundation of regulatory compliance. Email journaling works by creating connections between your email system and archiving platform through the SMTP protocol. When configured properly, journaling captures and preserves every message that flows through your environment in an immutable archive.
Email journaling seems straightforward, but the technical implementation contains crucial nuances that many organizations fail to appreciate.
The most critical aspect of journaling is the journal envelope: a container that holds complete metadata about each message. This envelope preserves information that would otherwise be lost, including BCC recipients and the full expansion of distribution lists.
When someone sends an email to “sales@company.com,” the journal envelope captures every individual recipient from that distribution list. Without this envelope data, you only see that an email was sent to a group address, not who actually received it. This distinction becomes crucial during legal discovery or compliance audits.
The Catastrophic Cost of Journaling Failures
When email journaling stops working, whether due to network issues, certificate expiration, platform outages, or configuration errors, the consequences extend far beyond IT inconvenience.
Organizations facing this scenario have only one option: manually migrate historical data from individual user mailboxes into the archive. This approach introduces multiple critical problems.
Costly and Time-Consuming
Manual migration can be very expensive and time-consuming. Just one terabyte can cost $9,000. It requires significant IT resources, specialized tools, and professional services, to extract and import data with full chain-of-custody.
Depending on the size of your organization and the duration of the outage, costs can easily escalate into five figures. If this is needed, Bluesource’s dedicated migrations team and software, ArchiveMASH, is the perfect solution.
Gaps in Compliance
User mailboxes are inherently unreliable sources of truth. Users regularly delete messages, either accidentally or intentionally. Some organizations face spoliation issues where employees delete potentially relevant evidence before litigation holds are implemented.
Once messages are deleted from a mailbox and purged from recoverable items, they’re gone forever. If those messages weren’t captured by journaling, they’re lost permanently, creating dangerous gaps in your compliance posture.
Unrecoverable Metadata
The most critical problem of flawed journaling and manual migration is the inability to recover BCC recipients or distribution list members. This metadata simply doesn’t exist in the mailbox copy of a message – it only exists in the journal envelope. Without this information, your archive contains incomplete records that may be challenged during legal proceedings or compliance audits.
Fallback Mailboxes
Email systems attempt to mitigate journaling failures through fallback mailboxes: special repositories that hold journal reports when the archive platform is unavailable. However, these mailboxes present their own risks. They can fill up quickly during an outage, and once filled, new journal reports are rejected entirely.
Even worse, emails stored in fallback mailboxes don’t automatically deliver to the archive when connectivity is restored. They require manual intervention to process, creating an operational burden and potential for human error.
Building a Resilient Archiving Infrastructure
Protecting your organization from these risks requires a multi-layered monitoring and infrastructure strategy.
- SMTP smart hosts
- Proactive monitoring
- Threshold monitoring
- Avoid certificate expiration
- Leverage SIEM platforms
- Manual verification
SMTP Smart Hosts
For organizations that self-host their email archives, implementing highly available SMTP smart hosts should be your top priority. These intermediary servers sit between your email system and archive platform, queuing messages locally before delivery. With SMTP hosts, you can patch and reboot our archive for maintenance without causing journal reports to backlog. Smart hosts also automatically retry delivery when the archive becomes available again.
Proactive Monitoring
Your fallback mailbox should remain empty under normal circumstances, making it an excellent canary for detecting problems. Configure alerts to trigger immediately when the message count exceeds zero, giving your team early warning of journaling disruptions before data loss occurs.
Threshold Monitoring
Implement threshold monitoring on your archive platform itself. Every organization has predictable email patterns, and Exchange or Gmail can tell you approximately how many messages should be archived daily. Configure alerts when ingestion falls below expected thresholds, indicating potential journaling failures even before the fallback mailbox begins accumulating messages.
Certificate Expiration
Certificate expiration is one of the most common, yet preventable causes, of journaling failure. SMTP connections to modern archives require valid TLS certificates, and expired certificates cause immediate connection failures. Establish automated monitoring with alerts at 90, 60, 30, and 7 days before expiration, giving your team ample time to renew certificates before they become a problem.
SIEM Platforms
For even more visibility, leverage SIEM platforms like Splunk or Microsoft Sentinel to aggregate and analyze SMTP tracking logs from both your email system and archive platform. These tools can identify patterns, detect anomalies, and provide unified visibility across your entire journaling infrastructure.
Manual Verification
Don’t rely solely on automated monitoring. Regularly perform spot-check searches in your archive for recent messages you know should exist. Manual verification ensures monitoring systems are working correctly, and archived data remains searchable and accessible. If manual checks raise any red flags, open support tickets to investigate before a larger problem arises.
Take Action Before Problems Arise
Email journaling failures don’t announce themselves – they occur silently. Compliance gaps that might only be discovered during litigation or audits, and then it’s too late to remediate. The question isn’t whether your organization can afford to implement comprehensive monitoring, but whether you can afford not to.
Bluesource is your ideal partner for email archiving. Stay proactive with a comprehensive audit and analysis of your journaling procedures.
Our team evaluates current infrastructure, identifies vulnerabilities, and provides actionable recommendations to protect your organization from data loss and compliance failures. Don’t wait for a journaling or archiving outage to discover you may be missing emails in your archive. Let us help you build a resilient, monitored, and compliant email archiving environment.
