Dozens of vendors, fitting loosely into four categories, offer competing e-mail archiving solutions. Despite a multitude of vendors, the field continues to expand. Start with leading solutions when narrowing the field.

Leaders in Four Product Classes

Do not confuse archiving with backup. An e-mail archiving solution takes messages out of the live e-mail server storage and makes this content available through a separate server. E-mail archiving exists to facilitate search and retrieval (called e-discovery) and to ease the storage burden on e-mail servers.