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...

If you're using Office 365, or one of the many hosted Exchange variants available today, you may be aware that MailStore has long been able to give you a complete and automatically synchronised off-site copy of your mail. I've always been happy recommending it as a solution, Office 365 outages happen so it is popular among our customers, however when my colleagues over in the German development team at MailStore let me know about their recent breakthrough in the latest version, I could immediately see the potential for hosted Exchange customers.

Alt-N Technologies, BackupAssist, MailStore....they were all there. And that's not all, we were even fortunate enough to bag a couple of inspirational guest victims speakers! Yes, just in case you've missed us shouting about it every five minutes, last month was our "PartnerMeet" event in Canary Wharf. As you've probably gathered, we don't do these that often (as often as we should!) and we were thrilled with the way it went, not least because of the great presentations made by the speakers we'd lined up for the day. If you weren't able to make it along then a) forever hold your head in shame and b) do not fear, we planned for this and took the liberty of booking a film crew to capture the lot. Enjoy footage in glorious HD of each and every presentation on the day....

If you've recently made the move to MailStore version 9, it's entirely possible you'll be sat there wondering why on earth all of those archiving jobs you had set up can't be modified any more. You'll hopefully be pleased when I tell you it's not a mistake and nothing's gone dramatically wrong, it's just that MailStore are now adopting a new and far more efficient way of automating jobs that no longer needs the old Windows task scheduler method.