Introduction

The continual increase in mail box volume and the limits of the Lotus Notes databases require the implementation of an archive system, which moves messages considered « obsolete » to another database.

There are large differences in mail box volume among users, especially when one considers one year of received and sent messages. The majority of this volume comes from attachments, most often involving PDF, Excel, Word , Zip files, etc. Aside from a few individual cases, most documents in the mail database are directly work related. Deleting mail box data (i.e. deletion without archiving), does not efficiently reduce the mail volume.

Archiving documents in an archive database allows the user to continue to access his old messages, and to research, without losing information related to the folders. Moreover, these archive databases must be saved for easy retrieval should a technical problem occur on the hard drive. For all the above reasons, archiving must occur on the server and NOT on the user’s local workstation.

ArchiveMail, also called ArchiveOnDB, automates the archiving of user's messages to one or several of the server's archive databases. At a given time (once a week, for example), messages that date back more than one year are transferred to the archive database. If this database does not yet exist, it is automatically created and a link is added to the user's mail box for easy access. In order to simplify document research, there exists an archive database for each calendar year (Archive2014, Archive2015, Archive2016...). The analysis of mail volume indicates that the total number of documents received/sent over the past year remains compatible with the volume constraints applied to a Notes database (64 GB max), which therefore guarantees an acceptable response time.

When a document has recently been moved, a link document automatically appears in the user's mail box which redirects the user to the moved document in the archive database. This allows the user to reduce the mail box volume (by deleting the volume of the moved documents), while the VDU remains unchanged in the mail database. These link documents then gradually disappear.

ArchiveOnDB therefore totally relieves the final user of all constraints related to the management of message volume and strongly reduces the Mail servers databases size.

A multi-databases Search Module is installed to provide the users a unique way to search messages among all their Notes databases (Mail database + Archive Databases).

If the user has a laptop computer, Archvive Mail can automatically creates local replica of the archive databases on the PC. This gives the users an off-line access to their Archive databases content.