As an archiving solution for individuals, MailStore Home is a hidden gem, and one we're guilty of not giving enough exposure here on the blog.  In a nutshell, MailStore Home solves two of the biggest problems you're likely to face as a home user with a personal email account(s):
  1. How to find specific emails quickly when they're buried among hundreds of messages from GroupOn 
  2. How not to lose your email should your hosting provider spontaneously combust

Will MailStore alert me when a job fails? Of the many queries I see as a member of the MailStore support team here at Zen Software, this is one of the more common ones. Unfortunately, for the time being at least, this isn't something you can do from within the software but fear not - the reason for my post is that there is a workaround. EDIT: Email reporting was introduced in v10.1 - more information here.

Today sees the latest point release in the roadmap of German developer MailStore, and in addition to a long list of fixes there are a couple of interesting new developments which have caught our collective Zen Software eye. Version 9.2's 'juicy bits' that I'll talk a little more about in this post include:
  • Independence from the Windows scheduler
  • A great new synchronisation feature for users of Office 365
  • Better handling of large search results in the MailStore clients
  • Support for the new 64-bit version of MDaemon

If you're struggling to manage your mailbox sizes, or just need to keep email for long periods for compliance reasons, you may well have found yourself looking around for an archiving solution of some kind.  There are plenty out there, with many sharing some similarities, however it's the technical approach of the various products that's a good method for distinguishing them. Some of the vendors you'll come across will employ the use of a technology known as 'stubbing'. As MailStore Server doesn't, in this post I'll take a brief look at what it is, and why it's German developers have decided against stubbing and instead chosen an alternative route.

In order for any users to log in to email archiving software MailStore Server, a local 'MailStore' user account needs to exist. You could simply just manually create users, entering usernames and passwords individually. However for any installation with more than a handful of users, as you can probably imagine, that can soon end up becoming a pain. For this reason, MailStore includes the directory services feature to synchronise local accounts with an external user list which is what I'm going to cover in this post.

Keeping more email than is actually needed is a habit that most people fall in to at some stage. But make no mistake, it is a problem. And it's not one to be ignored.

The main issue with keeping large volumes of email is the affect it has on your mail server and therefore the knock-on effect it has on Outlook (assuming that's what you're using!). With all of the additional load for your hardware to cope with, at best it'll become sluggish and unresponsive - at worst, it'll just grind to a halt altogether.

With the recent Panda Antivirus signature problem still fresh in my mind, and as a fair few of our support calls continue to be antivirus related, I thought you might find it useful if I share some of the antivirus issues we see regularly tripping customers up. Of course every software vendor professes their product incorporates the latest and greatest protection technology. When you're working out what to use as a Systems Administrator however, it's also important to think beyond that and specifically about how your proposed solution will interact with other applications in your network environment. These are a handful of the areas we find usually end up resulting in a support call.

If you're already backing up your email as part of a standard routine, you could be forgiven for thinking that adding archiving to the mix would needlessly be doubling up. I should mention at this point, if you're not doing anything at all, then you really need to be rectifying that situation rather than reading our blog (as nice as it is to have you).

We've just made the latest version of MailStore live on our site and if you, or perhaps your customers, are users of Google Apps, it's one I highly recommend you download. The ability to archive Google mail isn't completely new to MailStore, however in previous versions, each mailbox would need to be archived individually, requiring a separate archiving 'job' and manual entry (and ongoing maintenance) of username and password credentials. In version 9.1, the German developer have now made the whole process a breeze.

Our friends over at the German developer of MailStore Server have been busy conducting an international survey of 480 customers in the United States of America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Respondents were asked to rate the popular email archiving software in terms of documentation, support, product features from the administrator’s and user’s point of view, and the price/performance ratio. We're very pleased indeed to report that the response they received is in line with the glowing feedback we always hear as the UK distributor. For details, read the full report below...