Hi everyone, We're a small firm looking for an easy way to manage email archives. Because of what we do, it is important to be able to save emails as a record of communications in a way that retrieval is easy and they can kept in the event of contract disputes or litigation. It is important to note that we are a small firm and Micorosoft Outlook Exchange is not feasable. We need to have emails filed on a common server daily. They're sorted by project number, by sender, or recipient, and by date, with a comment about subject. We currently copy them manually from out outlood folders to the server in regular windows folders, named by hand with the date and breif description of the subject. This is rediculously labourious for todays day of computers and automation. So far I've discoverd that you can use the Auto Archive by folder feature in Outlook to do something which may meet our requirements. If each user creates a folder structure in their outlook and sets up the auto archive feature for each folder to write a .pst file to the common server, we can get .pst file for each of our current sorting catagories. For example: email in from sender A, email in from sender B, email sent to recipient A, email sent to recipient B... I would end up with a .pst for each. Then when there's a dispute or ened to retreive the email the user just, in outlook, chosses: file>open outlook data file>email in from sender A .pst and can then use the advanced search features of outlook to find the appropriate email message. Additionally they can be sorted via the header in the outlook window by sender, by date, etc... This all seems to work fairly well in early tests. The problem seems to be that every .pst file is created in such a way that, when you open the outlook data file, you get "arhived folders" with subfolders -deleted items, and -inbox>pst file name. This is a minor inconvenience and it seems like a symptom of the fact that we're actually misusing the archive feature to what we want instead of what it was intended for. The big problem is going to be for users that are not comfortable with using software. Some users are timid or fail to gain a complete understanding of directory structures, file locations, the concept of "drives", and other standard software use skills. It would be invaluable to be able to delete the leading folder structure ie. archived folders>delteded items and inbox>desired archive.pst. I would like the "archived folders" to show up with the name of the .pst file, or with only one folder in it which is named the same as the .pst file. I'm not sure if any of this is really possible. I would appreciate an suggestions of alternate methods, or possible problems with this system as it is proposed. For example, I saw some warning that outlook will overwrite archives each time it does an archive operation, but I've found it only adds to the existing archive. Are there situations where it migth overwrite? Thank You in Advance.
