Mailbox archive

In contrast to compliance archiving, mailbox archiving means that e-mails will be processed after having been received via Outlook by the user on the Exchange server. Mailbox archiving requires an installed ImageMaster Outlook Add-In for each Outlook client host.

From the user’s side, two scenarios of mailbox archiving are possible:

  • rule-based archiving (typical use case)

  • interactive archiving (a user selects the e-mails to be archived manually)

In practice a user can decide to never archive an e-mail manually and to completely rely on rule-based archiving. However, users may want to open and restore their e-mails manually from the archive in their everyday business.

Archiving, retrieving or restoring an e-mail from the archive is only supported for e-mails located in the Exchange environment. The ImageMaster Content Services for E-Mail functions do not work for e-mails that have been moved into the file system environment or into a local folder.

E-mails which have not been archived are represented in Outlook in the usual way, whereas archived e-mails can be identified by a special icon. This icon represents a link, also known as “stub”, which points to the archived e-mail. The archived e-mail identified with a stub can only be retrieved online, i.e. while access to the ImageMaster Content Services for E-Mail (and Exchange) is available, unless the Outlook Add-In feature “Offline Synchronization” is used in Exchange cache mode which allows offline access to synchronized e-mails (also see chapter Configuration). For more details on the Outlook Add-In GUI see the user manual [UM Mail].

If an e-mail is opened in Outlook just in the moment it becomes archived (interactive or rule-based) or when it is being restored, Outlook closes this e-mail automatically to update the view for the changed content.

After an e-mail is archived by ImageMaster, any changes (e.g. in subject or attachment) in this e-mail on the Exchange server are not re-synchronized with ImageMaster. Such a changed e-mail remains unmodified in ImageMaster in the original state as it was first archived.

See chapter Mailbox archive use cases for further mailbox archive use cases.

Special character handling

If the system is configured to save the e-mail body text additionally as metadata value (beside the same body always being contained in the MSG file binary), e-mails cannot be archived if they contain characters in the body text, which are incompatible with XML according to the XML 1.0 specification [W3C Recommendation]. An error with a message as follows would occur:

  • “com.ctc.wstx.exc.WstxParsingException: Illegal character entity: expansion character”

A configuration to bypass invalid characters in such a scenario is available in the ImageMaster AdminClient. See ImageMaster settings in [UM AdminClient].

If the system is configured to save the folder path as metadata value, the path of an item inside the mailbox will be added to this value. To avoid ambiguous values, the following characters are replaced:

  • “&” with “&”

  • “/” with “/”

  • “/” with “/”

  • The backslash “\” is replaced by a slash “/” (so the path separator is unified in a final step).