Mailstore server can save you a lot of money and time. Do you use Exchange server? I do. Do you archive emails? I do. Am I using Exchange archiving? No, I don’t. There are many solutions for Email archiving and Mailstore server is one of the best, period.
What makes Mailstore one of the best archiving solutions? Price is one of them, even though it’s not the cheapest it’s very affordable.
Another advantage is support for every major email server, from Exchange, Gmail, Kerio….to IceWarp email server.
Mailstore server review
When I first installed Mailstore server I was surprised by the install file size, it weights less than 40MB. But don’t let small file size foul you. It’s a great product.
Console is simple and trust me when I tell you that you almost won’t need a manual to set it up. I didn’t. I did read it afterwards, just to be sure I didn’t forget something :). First view is about server information, licensing and Quick Access to most common actions.
Mailstore server supports 6 major email solutions out of the box, if your server is not supported you can create Imap/Pop3 profile and archive just about any email soltution. In addition, Mailstore server also supports archiving of email clients like Mozilla Thunderbird and Seamonkey, Windows Mail… and it also supports archiving email files like PST, MBOX, EML. To archive Email clients and files you have to install a client on a computer. It looks almost the same like the server console, the only difference being additional menus on the left side.
Archiving Exchange is simple. First you have to decide what you want to archive. You can create a job for archiving Single Mailbox, Multiple Mailboxes, Public folders or All of the emails that are In and Out bound. The latter is the most popular option among the financial institutions and big companies. In that case you have to enable journaling.
Mailstore server has great options for email compliance, you can set up Retention policies, Legal hold to disable deleting emails, disable email preview for Administrators and you can set up Auditor Access.
Mailstore server has every option for Auditing you can imagine, making it a really compliant solution.
What about client side? My favourite feature is that you add archived account to your email client. In the past you had to use Mailstore Outlook Addin. That was confusing for users since they were used to archived folders attached below their main email account.
The magic behind this feature is IMAP server which you can enable. Sure, users can’t delete emails in archived mailbox. Unless you set it up. But most likely you wont. Mailstore also provides Outlook Addin. User can use it if windows search stops working or if user has advanced search requirements.
In addition to Outlook Addin, there is also a client which can be used for moving old PST files or emails from Email client to the archive server.
Is Mailstore server Perfect?
There are some things I would really like to see added to the next major version. List is not that big, but there are some features that are missing, nothing major, though.
Currently you are not able to have separate data stores like one for Journaling the other for Single or Multiple mailboxes. That would make sense when you want to separate really important archive from the one which is less important and resides on a cheap SATA storage. You are also not able to backup really important archive to one location and less important archive to less reliable storage.
Another feature that is missing is attachments only archiving. Your users would not be limited to email archiving because their inbox size exceeds X MB. Instead they would be able to have emails older than 12 months and only attachments bigger or older than defined amount would get archived. When user would open that attachment, it would be pulled from archive server instead their mailbox.
Client side feature I am missing is ability to archive PST files remotely. In a easy to configure way.
Conclusion
I know that Mailstore server is not perfect, but I love it anyway. For one, you don’t need Expensive MS SQL server for storing archive. Their team must be consuming a lot of RedBull as the product is evolving rapidly and I know features I am missing will soon pop up in the next release. Their support is top notch. If you need help, they will contact you via Phone and assist you. Price is great and the product is light on resources.They also support many email servers which is a big plus. All in all a great product. ITSMDaily recommended
Thanks for a great review Erik – we’re the UK and Ireland distributor for MailStore.
Hope you don’t mind me picking up on a point about the lack of ‘attachment only’ archiving…
I’m sure there are scenarios where this is useful however the view we take is that messages are such a relatively small amount of data once you’ve removed the attachment that in most cases it makes sense to store them too.
You’d also miss out on the performance increases that come from having less entries in the Exchange database as these still need to be written for the messages. We like to archive off as much as possible so Exchange sees the biggest reduction in load we can manage.
Thanks again,
James
Hi James,
I am really glad you stopped by.
While attachment only archiving may not be for all, I see my users archiving every month with a rule – archive emails older than 1 month.
They receive a lot of PDFs, Catalogues and Pictures.
At the same time it’s really important for them to have all the emails in their inbox.
I am sorry I can not provide them this feature as it would make their day.
And I also know that solutions that do cost a lot of money.
In the end, that feature along with others remain on my wish list.
As for performance increases I don’t really agree with you as the latest Exchange releases can work really well with SATA drives but they require a lot of RAM, it’s by design. You also get similar effect by stripping big attachments and keeping emails or stripping both attachments and emails.
I think there is potential for this feature, as is for separating Datastores one for important archive and the other for less important emails, maybe one for compliance as well (journaling).
Just my 2 cents.