We email each other a lot nowadays. I spend a significant amount of time behind my Outlook client everyday. Reading and writing emails. I especially like all the “FYI” (For Your Interest) mails. Usually they are very interesting but there is no direct action required. So, you need to save this email for awhile. Your inbox grows rapidly this way and online email providers understand this. They give you a 7 Gb mailbox or more!
But your company IT department is less generous. You’ve got a 100Mb mailbox within your organisation. This means you’ll have to clean your mailbox every week at least and because you want to save a lot of mail you create your first offline archive, a PST file. A PST file will always result in loss of data. During every migration or system failure someone forgets to backup it’s PST files and has lost all his communication of the past years.
Until your IT department wakes up and puts the whole mail service in the cloud, you can use a good alternative. Put your whole email archive within a Gmail mailbox!
Some simple steps:
1. Open a new Gmail account
2. Within Gmail, go to Settings, Forwarding and POP/IMAP and enable IMAP
3. Configure your emailclient to connect with the Gmail mailbox (http://mail.google.com/support/bin/topic.py?topic=12913)
4. Drag and drop all the folders and mail items from your mail archive (PST file) to the Gmail mailbox (this took me a while)
5. Remove the Offline Archive and your done!
From now on drag all the emails you want to keep to the Gmail mailbox and it’s always available. You can even search your archive from an internet café, simply by going to gmail.com and logging in with your credentials.
The mail items within Outlook are also offline available and Windows Vista or 7 automatically indexes them!
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If I did this with my work email, I would be fired for moving potentially sensitive company emails outside the firewall as well as potentially violating our mail archiving and deletion policy.
Just a thought… it isn’t as easy as many people make it out to be.
You are right. It should always be insync with the security policy of your company. One easy we to prevent this within your company is blocking the imap servers of gmail (or any other online mailservice) by your firewall.
For laptops it’s something different.
But then again, a company should decide for itself what is the more secure solution. Employees working with PST on their laptops (that leave the building) or having their mail in the cloud…
Making a copy of your mail and putting it at gmail (in this case) doesn’t mean you can still enforce your own archiving and deleting policy. The mail is still entering and leaving your mailserver.
With this method you’re still placing company data (either confidential or company classified) on gmail servers, where they can be read, indexed and data mined. I’m pretty sure the company I work for would not be thrilled if I placed my email on gmail servers. I’m also pretty sure my company has rules about forwarding company mail to external mailboxes, for the same reason. I’m fairly pretty much sure this connection isn’t encrypted in transit (when reading in the internet café) (and yes, I know the origin of most email isn’t encrypted, as it’s SMTP, that still doesn’t mean I’m comfortable with reading the now-no-longer-anonymous email over whatever kind of non-encrypted channel. I’ll stick to storing (regularly backupped) PST files on my encrypted laptop volume for now.
Looks a lot like the Outlook connector for Windows Live mail. Has been there for a while (since hotmail).
Not intended for business use, I think.
Companies with 100 MB mailbox quotas should consider their strategy, for sure. Employees become very creative in these kind of situations. A European citizen should place business email on European mailservers.
- Paul
It\’s not relevant if the server is in Europe, Indonesia, Israel, USA or wherever.
If the policy of your company states content should not be moved out of the country you better leave it there.
When you have an international role there should be an exception explicitly.
Haha it’s great to see all those concerned reactions. Maybe we should start a blog post about ways you can prevent your users from doing this.
A lot of companies have got a policy against placing their mail on servers outside their country but are ok by placing their PST files on their laptops. (encrypted or not, I don’t care)
With tools like these (https://mail.google.com/mail/help/email_uploader.html) and mobile users that know their way around a computer, what can you do?
One of the best ways is giving your users a mailbox with unlimited size. But that’s very expensive. An other way is putting your mailservice in the cloud. That’s cheap, but can conflict with a lot of your current policies.
I never see info like this on the Net anymore. I love your blog and I recommend it to all of my friends and family, thanks again!
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