Email archive and 3rd party journal account

[JohnGage]

We are moving to Applied Systems hosted Exchange.  Applied does not offer archiving so we will continue to use our in-house solution (MailArchiva) and send all incoming/outgoing mail to a journal account.  The catch with hosted exchange is that the journal account must be outside of the domain that is being hosted - or so I've been told.

My first solution to the journal account issue was to either use our LAN Exchange or replace it with an open source email server.  Either way the server would only handle the journal account, which would be emptied by the archive tool almost immediately after the message was received.  Currently on old SBS server that will eventually be replaced with a Windows Standard box so I was trying to avoid dependence on Exchange.

Then after thinking about it more I wondered if I couldn't use a hosted POP/IMAP address such as those available from GoDaddy or any number of other vendors.  The issue is security, is it wise to send all email to a 3rd party other than Applied who is hosting the entire Exchange environment?

[Mark]

Interesting.  I think there could be a lot of different ways to do this, however the easiest and most effective might be to use a cloud based archiving solution.  Otherwise you're offloading your exchange management to a third party, paying them to manage it for you, and you're still managing a possibly complex email server in the end.

I'm all for rolling your own, but sometimes it can be more work or not as cost effective.

EDIT: I looked at the support docs for MailArchiva and since it is not an MTA, I think this would be a PITA to setup.  It just uses Exchange Journaling, which means all the archiving takes place through a Journaling mailbox.  You'd have to have a local Exchange server that sends and receives all your email.  Your MX records would have to point at the local Exchange instance, and your hosted Exchange would have to relay through the local Exchange.

[JohnGage]

Mark to your point about a cloud based archival solution I agree 100%.  Unfortunately the task was to "archive everything forever, and do it cheaply."  With Exchange on our LAN and MailArchiva Open Source Edition I've been successful in meeting that goal.  Now moving the Exchange off the LAN has made it so I need a journal account outside of our domain. 

I was able to test MA and it is able to pull mail from any IMAP mailbox.  Knowing that my choices seem to be
1) Pay 3rd party for cloud archival - Isn't going to happen
2) Maintain an in-house email server just for the journal account - an option but more maintenance than option #3
3) Trust a 3rd party to host an IMAP mailbox and use it as a journal account to pull from. - I talked myself into this option

Rather than use a random 3rd party vendor I'll use a mailbox provided by our ISP.  All my mail goes across their circuit anyway, not sure that matters but it sounds better than trusting another vendor.

[Mark]

Sounds like a decent solution.  I was originally thinking that if MA could just work as an SMTP relay/forwarder, then it would have been no problem, but I saw that it uses Journaling which requires a mailbox.  that rendered my initial thoughts useless. lol

Our archiving option is crummy.. maybe I should look at this Open Source solution you speak of!  Right now I am just using a Journaling mailbox and exporting to pst every week, then archiving those PSTs.  It's worked very well for us for a few years, it's just a pain to go through pst after pst when you don't know the exact time frame or you have a big window to search through.