POP3 Email Archiving

POP3 Email Archiving

    If you have one ore more POP3 Accounts and wish to preserve an archive of all the verbatim email content within the mailboxes, then you need a software solution like Hexamail Vault. With this software you can collect a copy of all POP email data on a configurable schedule, and have it archived into a store on your own servers on your own network for safe keeping.

    This guide will show you how easy it is to set up POP collecting and archiving using Hexamail Vault.

    Hosted POP3/IMAP/Gmail/Office365 Account Download email Local archived storage
    Hosted POP3/IMAP/Gmail/Office365 Account Download email Local archived storage

Installing the software

    The first step is to obtain a trial or full version of the software and install it on a suitable machine. You can download the software from here: Download Software.

    Once downloaded please follow this guide to install it correctly:

    Once it is installed we need to configure the settings to collect POP and archive the downloaded data.

POP3 Collection

    To start configuring the POP3 Collection of email (or downloading email from Gmail, Office 365 or an IMAP source) please open the Hexamail Vault Administration GUI you installed in the previous step and click on the POP3 Reader page of settings. In the first tab you will see "System Accounts" We will create one system account to download email from a pop server into Hexamail.

    • Configure to download POP/IMAP/Gmail/Office365 email account(s)
      Configuring POP3 Collection
      Enter the details of your POP account as provided by your email service provider. We provide help for many common types fo account here Entre a reroute to address. This is the email address the email that are downloaded will be sent to if you want to send them to a local mailserver or mailboxes. If you just want to archive the email, you can just use the email address of the account, and check the box "Do not deliver archived email" in the archiver that will be discussed later in this guide.
    • Set up the schedule for the downloading
      POP3 Collection Schedule
      It may be that you want to download email more frequently during the day to have an up to date archive, or not at all during the day to preserve bandwidth for office workers.
    • Additionally output a copy of email to disk as files if required
      POP3 Collection Output
      You can also opt to save email as individual files locally to disk. This is in addition to the compressed, full-text and indexed archiving performed by the Archiver module (see below). It should not be used for large scale storage unless you are confident you have a sufficiently large and fast hard disk to store the data on. These options can also be used to export email in a format that is useful and convenient for another process to pick up and add to a database etc.

Email Archiving

    Next we need to setup the archiving parameters to store the email we are downloading from the POP account. Please open the Hexamail Vault Administration GUI you installed in the previous step and click on the Archiver page of settings. In the first tab you will see "Sources".

    Configuring POP3 Collection
    Select POP3, IMAP and SMTP received email. Then check the next two boxes underneath:
    "Archive SMTP gateway and IMAP/POP3 downloaded email" To enable archiving of all email passing thru Hexamail
    and
    "Do not deliver archived email" This will prevent the downloaded email being sent on to the next email server for delivey to another mailbox.

    Press APPLY and Hexamail should start downloading and archiving all your pop email. You can now configure other aspects such as the Web Interface if you wish to allow users to query the archive over the Internet/Intranet, or use Antispam and Antivirus features to filte remail before it gets to the archiver.