Zimbra Archive and Discovery

Zimbra Archiving

XMission Zimbra hosting now fully supports Archiving & Discovery (A&D). Zimbra Archiving and Discovery is an optional feature that enables archiving of messages that were delivered to or sent by Zimbra Collaboration. It also gives domain administrators the ability to cross-search mailboxes for specific messages.

Archiving is setup on a per/account basis. When this feature is enabled for an account, a copy of all email from or to that account is forked at the MTA and a copy of the message is delivered to their archive mailbox.

Zimbra archiving can be set up to create archiving accounts that are maintained within Zimbra Collaboration or to work with third-party archiving systems using SMTP forwarding to send messages to a third-party archive server. For third-party archiving, Zimbra Collaboration is configured to act as the forwarding agent.

Enabling A&D For Your Accounts

In Zimbra's admin interface, search for the desired user you'd like to enable A&D for. Right-click their account, select 'edit' and in their 'general information' settings change their Class of Service from what is currently listed to either 'archive_xmbase' or 'archive_xmpremium'. In the left-hand column that features all their account options, select 'archiving' and if their status displays "enable archiving: No" You can click on the button that says "Enable archiving"

You will also need to create the new target archive mailbox, so click "create" and it should automatically generate a name+numericalsequence@domain.archive account. Highlight that account in the list, and then click "Select" and then you should see the field "Currently archived to" be filled in with that newly created archive box. Save, close out of the account and when you search the user again, you should be able to see two entries in the search results; their regular account, and a separate archive account.

We recommend you verify archiving is working properly by sending a test message to their account, and then proxy the archive mailbox to ensure your test is dropped in there as well. You can proxy a mailbox by right-clicking on the highlighted account and selecting "View mail"

Discovery

The discovery feature of Archiving and Discovery is used to search across live and archive mailboxes for email messages and attachments. The discovery tool can be run from the Administration Console and the results are copied to a target mailbox that you specify.

You can search outgoing and incoming email by date, from, to, cc, subject, keywords, and attachments. You can also create queries to search by name, dates and time ranges, distribution list, aliases.

Search results are placed in a target mailbox. You can organize your search results by creating different target mailboxes or by creating individual folders within a target mailbox for each search you run. X-zimbra-Source header information is added to each message header that is copied to the targeted mailbox. This header label includes the account ID, the account name, and the server that the account resides on.

You can see the results of the search by logging on to the target mailbox address.

How to Search via Discovery

In Zimbra Admin, click on 'tools' and then 'search mail' Over in the right-hand corner, click on the gear sprocket and select 'new'

This will load a blank slate for search parameters. You can specify multiple options such as basic to and from data/date/time to get more granular in your search.

Make sure to specify the server, as well as the target mailbox for search results. If any messages are found with the specified parameters, it will drop them in the specified Mail folder for results.

Pricing

The current rate of A&D licensed accounts is $1.50 per/month per/mailbox. Additional quota is $0.10 per/gig of anything above 20GB.

Retention for Archived accounts

Our mail retention policy remains the same even for archived accounts. If a archive mailbox is deleted, mailbox data will be purged 45 days after.