I'm currently consulting for an organization that has a massive archive of emails stretching back over 30 years. They moved to Microsoft 365 about three years ago, but prior to that, their emails were stored on-premises. The managed service provider they worked with took everything over a year old and saved them in PST files on an old file server. Each user has their emails stored in separate PST files—sometimes more than one if their mailbox was particularly large or had numerous folders. Now, with many former employees, the owner wants to find a way to search through all these PST files (around 50 to 80, totaling about 400GB) for important historical information and old project notes—kind of like searching in Outlook. Does anyone know of a platform or tool that can help aggregate and search through these PST files efficiently?
5 Answers
Caution here! Storing emails for that long can create huge legal liabilities, especially if they ever get subpoenaed in litigation. You might want to consult a lawyer to limit exposure instead of just pulling from all 30 years of email. It's bonkers to keep so much around!
Totally agree! It’s a legal disaster waiting to happen.
To be honest, you may find it hard to get many cost-effective tools that do what you’re looking for. Most of them are pretty expensive, but you could consider using something like Mimecast, which supports PST imports and offers good search functionality.
Mimecast is on the pricier side, but it’s quite comprehensive!
True! If you have a budget, Mimecast is definitely one to look at.
Have you looked into Barracuda's archiving service? It’s designed for businesses and allows you to import PSTs into a searchable database, which seems to be exactly what you need.
Barracuda worked well for us when we had a similar migration.
Yeah, Barracuda is solid but can get pricey.
You might also want to check out ArcTitan. It allows for importing PST files and searching the archived emails easily. It’s mainly for continuous archiving, but it does provide some efficient search options.
ArcTitan has been great for us; I highly recommend it!
I've also had a good experience with ArcTitan's features.
Mailstore is a solid solution. It allows you to aggregate PST files and search through the content as if it's in Outlook. Definitely worth checking out!
Second this! Mailstore has worked wonders for us.
I’ve had great experiences with Mailstore too, it’s pretty straightforward.
Is there a recommended retention policy for emails then?