VIPRE Email Security Archiving FAQ

Email Security - Archiving FAQ

FAQ Contents

• FAQ

• General Questions

  • What's Email Security - Archiving?

  • What's the difference between Email Security - Archiving and "legacy" VaultSMART?

    • Visual / UI

    • Functional Quality

    • Architecture

  • Tell me about this release of Email Security - Archiving.

• Sales Questions

  • What are the various archiving services offered by VIPRE Email Security?

  • Who can I sell Email Security - Archiving to?

  • What are the primary benefits of Email Security - Archiving?

  • Can I sell Email Security - Archiving without VIPRE Email Security Essentials?

  • Is there a discount for selling VIPRE Email Security Essentials, Email Security - Archiving, & Phishing Protection together?

  • How does Email Security - Archiving compare to the competition?

  • What happens if someone selects the "US Compliance Package" (which ensures that their email is processed within the United States) along with Email Security - Archiving?

  • Why are we offering only an unlimited Email Security - Archiving package?

  • Can we offer a cheaper Email Security - Archiving package with a shorter message retention time?

• Product Questions

  • Why does the reseller have to set up the compliance admin for the account? Why can't the account administrator do it?

  • Why do continuity and archive (Email Security - Archiving) have separate places in the Admin Portal UI? Couldn't they just be combined?

• Operational Questions

  • How does our message de-duplication work?

  • What happens if a user leaves Email Security - Archiving/VIPRE Email Security Essentials, then a new user with the same name is added to the same company - would this user have access to the previous user's email?

  • How long does it take to ingest email into Email Security - Archiving (journaled, or as it flows through the email filters)?

  • What about customers who surreptitiously attempt to import emails into the archive by just journaling an existing archive? Can we prevent that?

  • Do we mark the message origin of a message (journaled, or archived via VIPRE Email Security)?

  • Does the audit log capture the creation of a compliance administrator?

  • Can a reseller see the contents of a customer archive?

  • If an email is replayed via the Admin Portal, will it be recaptured into the archive?

  • What is the maximum number of emails that can be journaled at once?

  • What happens if a customers is suspended (i.e. their mailflow is put on hold)? Do we stop ingesting messages into the archive?

  • Can we search for attachment types within a .zip or .rar file?

  • How do we handle messages with multiple recipients?

  • Is email downloaded via a journaling collector filtered?

     

FAQ

General Questions:

What's Email Security - Archiving?

Email Security - Archiving is an email archiving service offered by VIPRE Email Security. It integrates and is managed through the VIPRE Email Security administrative console.

What's the difference between Email Security - Archiving and "legacy" VaultSMART?

Visual / UI

The first thing you'll notice is that legacy VaultSMART is a standalone product, and not integrated into our email security portals (neither portal [https://portal.mailanyone.net], or the more modern portal [https://email.myvipre.com]). This is important, because we want products that integrate and drive people to using, understanding, and accessing our range of solutions from a single user interface.

Then, you'll notice that, visually, legacy VaultSMART has a very dated user interface. Explore a little further, and you'll find that certain elements, such as advanced search, are very awkward to use. It's just not a good user interface.

Functional

Functionally, Email Security - Archiving and legacy VaultSMART will have similar features, once we complete feature implementation on Email Security - Archiving.

Quality

However, many features on legacy VaultSMART don't work, or don't work well.

Architecture

Under the hood, the differences between legacy VaultSMART and Email Security - Archiving are immense. The new Email Security - Archiving shares a common indexing and storage architecture along with message logs, which makes for an efficient and easily managed solution.

Tell me about this release of Email Security - Archiving.

This release of Email Security - Archiving is our first release, and is intended to provide basic archiving services for compliance officers and end users.

The service captures emails that flow through VIPRE Email Security's filtering service, as well as emails journaled to it through a journaling connector.

The service allows named compliance officers to perform basic and advanced searches in the archive. End-users can search their "personal" archives (i.e. emails that they have sent or received).

Further releases will add additional features, such as import/export to/from the archive, tagging messages, scheduled searches, and other features.

Sales Questions

What are the primary benefits of Email Security - Archiving?

There are three primary benefits:

1. Single "Pane of Glass" for managing email security: Email Security - Archiving is a cost-effective archiving solution that integrates with the VIPRE Email Security administrative portal to provide a "single pane of glass" for managing a customer's email security needs - spam/virus filtering, email continuity, and now email archiving.

2. Simple add-on to VIPRE Email Security services: It integrates easily into existing email flows through VIPRE Email Security. Simple configuration through either a journaling connector or a journaling mailbox (coming soon) is all that's needed to get Email Security - Archiving "turned on" to a customer's existing mail flows.

3. Managed access to company email archives: Email Security - Archiving also ensures a clear separation between email administrators and compliance officers, by ensuring that the person who administers VIPRE Email Security services cannot access or gain access to a company's email archives.

 

Can I buy Email Security - Archiving without VIPRE Email Security Essentials?

No. Email Security - Archiving complements VIPRE Email Security Essentials (as well as Phishing Protection) to provide a complete email security system. Email Security - Archiving strengthens our overall product offering.

Is there a discount for buying VIPRE Email Security Essentials, Email Security - Archiving, & Phishing Protection together?

No. We do not have discounts for combining these services together. However, we are considering repackaging options for next year.

Why are we offering only an unlimited Email Security - Archiving package?

A few reasons:

For product simplicity and configuration, we've decided to currently only offer an "unlimited" Email Security - Archiving package. When selected, emails will be held forever. We will, however, offer a feature to enable companies to select a separate retention period, after which emails are deleted. This will ensure compliance to corporate and regulatory requirements to retain data as required, but no longer. Our competitors primarily offer or focus their offerings on unlimited retention packages.

Product Questions

Why does the reseller have to set up the compliance admin for the account? Why can't the account administrator do it?

Here's what we wanted to do:

• We wanted to ensure that only a compliance officer could have access to a company's archive. This ensures a strict delineation between those who administer the account (admins) and those who review company email (compliance officers).

• We didn't want to allow customer admins to create compliance officers, because then those customer admins could just create their own accounts and review all of their corporate emails.

• Consequently, the only real way to set up a compliance officer was to have it done "outside" of the account - namely by the reseller.

• So, the reseller needs to create the compliance officer account for the customer when the customer is provisioned with Email Security - Archiving.

Why do continuity and archive (Email Security - Archiving) have separate places in the Admin Portal UI? Couldn't they just be combined?

Good question - this was also something we considered. A couple of reasons:

1. It is important to clearly delineate the workflows - we wanted it to be extremely clear to end users where they go to use continuity features (review/reply/forward), and where they go to use Email Security - Archiving features. As a result, users with continuity may see an email in two different places in the UI - in continuity as well as in Email Security - Archiving, along with different actions that can be taken on each mail.

2. The second reason was to clearly show the additional product that the customer has received - namely Email Security - Archiving. A separate menu item shows the separate workspace for Email Security - Archiving, and hopefully conveys that archived emails are separately and securely held, and are distinct from continuity emails (which will disappear after 90 days).

 

Operational Questions

How does our message de-duplication work?

Generally speaking, we don't de-duplicate messages, but we avoid capturing messages twice.

For example, an email may pass through VIPRE Email Security on the way to a customer. We archive the email as it flows through our servers. We also add VIPRE Email Security headers to these messages. If the customer has a journaling connector set up, then the journaling collector checks for these headers (x-fusemail-origin, x-vaultsmart) and does not ingest messages with these headers (as they would be duplicates).

If a message comes into Email Security - Archiving with, say, 5 recipients, we will create 5 indexes pointing to one copy of this message - a copy for each end-user. If a compliance administrator searches the company Email Security - Archiving archive, then 5 results will be shown for the same message.

What happens if a user leaves Email Security - Archiving/VIPRE Email Security Essentials, then a new user with the same name is added to the same company - would this user have access to the previous user's email?

To rephrase ... if fred@company.com belongs to a company and his email is being archived, if he leaves, and then a new employee (also with the recycled email address of fred@company.com) joins the company then, yes, under this circumstance, the "new" Fred would have access to the old Fred's emails.

This can be easily avoided by ensuring that a company does not recycle email addresses.

How long does it take to ingest email into Email Security - Archiving (journaled, or as it flows through the email filters)?

Ingestion is very quick - usually seconds, but will be longer for larger messages (up to minutes). Messages are ingested into Email Security - Archiving about as fast as we ingest and report for message logs.

What about customers who surreptitiously attempt to import emails into the archive by just journaling an existing archive? Can we prevent that?

At the moment, we don't prevent this. It is indeed possible. It may overload the journaling mailbox and stop ingestion, however. This would likely be a corner case and not something we're explicitly blocking at the moment.

Do we mark the message origin of a message (journaled, or archived via VIPRE Email Security)?

Yes, we mark it and record it in the source field.

Does the audit log capture the creation of a compliance administrator?

Yes, when a compliance administrator is created, this is captured in the audit log for the customer, and can be seen by the customer super admin.

Can a reseller see the contents of a customer archive?

No. A reseller cannot see the contents of a customer's Email Security - Archiving archive.

If an email is replayed via the Admin Portal, will it be recaptured into the archive?

Yes, if it is replayed, it will be captured again into the archive.

What is the maximum number of emails that can be journaled at once?

Our journaling connector will download a maximum of 2000 messages at one time, with a maximum mail size of 256MB.

What happens if a customers is suspended (i.e. their mail flow is put on hold)? Do we stop ingesting messages into the archive?

We do not take any special action on Email Security - Archiving as a result of customer suspension. Messages that flow into us would still be archived, and we would still journal from a customer's mail server. We would still archive their outbound mail.

Can we search for attachment types within a .zip or .rar file?

Yes, it is recursive. There is a recursive limit, however. We will index a word document in a zip file, for example.

How do we handle messages with multiple recipients?

It depends how the message enters our system. If the message enters as separate individual messages for each recipient, then we archive each message. If the message enters as one message, then we store that message, and provide a pointer to that message for each recipient.

Is email downloaded via a journaling collector filtered?

No - email downloaded via a journaling collector is not subject to spam/virus filters. (Consider the workflow - the process to download emails through a journaling collector doesn't have an option to enable a user to review a quarantine report corresponding for the journaled email. Additionally, email on a customer's server has likely been spam / virus filtered, so is less likely to contain messages that need filtering.)