Archiving all messages with Exchange Server Archiver

Your company policy may require you to archive all incoming and outgoing messages, including those that are permanently deleted by the user. You can use Exchange Server Archiver with Exchange Server's journaling feature to achieve this without disrupting your users.

First, set up a journaling mailbox in your Exchange Server. The journaling mailbox receives a copy of a message every time a user in a journal-enabled mailbox database sends or receives a message. For detailed information about how to do this, see Microsoft® TechNet Journaling with Exchange Server.

When you have set up the journaling mailbox, in Exchange Server Archiver:

Ensure the archive mode is set to Full archive or Copy entire message.
Create an archive rule with the condition to archive all messages.
Apply the archive rule to the journaling mailbox.

Whenever the archive rule is run, all the messages in the journaling mailbox are processed and archived as necessary. Archiving the journaling mailbox uses only one Exchange Server Archiver mailbox license. For more information about what happens when an archive rule is run, see The archive process.

Note that if you are using Exchange Server 2010 or Exchange Server 2007 journaling, single-instance storage in the Archive Stores is not possible.

You can then clean up the journaling mailbox at regular intervals by using Retention Policies (in Exchange 2010) or Mailbox Manager (in Exchange 2007 and Exchange 2003) to permanently delete messages that you know have been archived.

You can continue to run regular archives on the user mailboxes in the usual way.

In this way, all messages sent from, or received by, journal-enabled mailboxes are archived to comply with your company policy, and messages that are not deleted by your users are archived in due course from the user mailboxes according to your schedule.

Searching the archived journaling mailbox

You can search the journaling mailbox when it has been archived using the Outlook Add-in or Outlook Web Access Add-in, in the usual way. For details, see Using the Outlook Add-in and Using the Outlook Web Access Add-in.

If you need to search all archived messages, you can do this using the User Archive Access Service Admin Search. For details of how to use the Admin Search, see Searching all archived messages with Exchange Server Archiver.

Note that if you are using Exchange Server 2010 or Exchange Server 2007 journaling, whichever search method you use, the message body of an archived message is not searched; only the Sender, Recipients, Subject, and Date are searched.

Keywords: journalling, journaling, journal mailbox, SIS

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