The Difficulties in Running a Mail Server

The main goal of every administrator is to automate most of the daily routines that consume much of the allocated time that could otherwise be spent researching new technologies or ways on how to improve the current system.

The time window that the administrator has during the day is mostly consumed by user tasks which consist of routine work or user problems. Some of the problems encountered by most of the administrators are:

• A user will be away from the office and needs to synchronize or access his/ her mailbox from abroad. This will consist of the user either obtaining a good internet connection where the mailbox can be accessed directly or making an offline local copy of the user’s whole mailbox on the laptop every time the user needs to go out of the office. This can be a pretty time consuming procedure that will need to be done each time for every user. This will also increase the phone calls to the administrator at inconvenient times about either connection interruptions or in the event that the user cannot access his/her mail.

• Users will have reached their email limit and their mailboxes are full. The administrator will get a lot phone calls and requests to increase the size of the mailbox or support calls of undelivered mails. This will create problems with users having large mailboxes full of emails where maintenance and server performance can be affected. If users create a local copy of the mailbox so that they transfer emails from the mailbox to a local PST file, it will be a hassle to create scheduled tasks to backup the user’s local PST files.

• Searching in large mailboxes can be slow and can drastically affect the mail server’s performance. Having 100 or more large mailboxes means that a user’s search for a particular email will have to go through thousands of entries in each mailbox which will lead to a drastic decrease in performance.

• Users having the problem of retrieving emails which were deleted from the mailbox.  The administrator would have to retrieve the emails from the daily or weekly backup to the user’s mailbox. This is very time consuming, especially because the administrator has to go through the backups and retrieve only the needed emails from the backup mailbox.

As you can see the daily job of a mail server administrator is not always productive as it is mostly taken up by user issues and requests. Automation or user interaction to sort these daily issues would increase the productivity of the administrator and it will supply a real-time solution for the user.

GFI MailArchiver archives every email from the Journaling mailbox into a database. The emails stored can be viewed, searched and categorized by a user friendly interface. An email can be tagged with frequently used keywords for better lookup. The user has the possibility to find a deleted email (since every email is archived) and can either download or save that particular email.

Also for portability, the user can install the Outlook Connector which is a companion of the mailbox where the emails are synchronized with the GFI MailArchiver server. The emails can be downloaded for offline use with a defined number of days.

This way the administrator does not have to backup the user’s own PST files; does not have to retrieve any emails from the backup since all emails can be retrieved via GFI MailArchiver; does not have to worry about mail server performance due to the ability to search over thousands of emails using just GFI MailArchiver. All of this can be done with minor interventions from the users in a user friendly environment.

Decrease an administrator’s stress on mail server administration, increase productivity and promote a hassle free operation with just one product.