Switching the company over to Google Apps last fall has been, for me at least, such a huge boon that I definitely have no regrets. It has, however, certainly introduced some “operational” impacts though. For instance, handling ex-employees and their mailboxes.
Now, in the MS Exchange era that we were previously in, this was a no- brainer: Leave the mail on the server. Anyone needs it, give ‘em access. I’m sure we can all quote assorted compliance policies on why email should be retained [for some defined period of time]. We can also probably think of reasons why the “leave it on the server” forever method isn’t really such a good idea anymore, but things have changed a lot in the last decade.
When using Google Apps and you’re now paying for each mailbox, that policy of abandonment has to be re-thought. Yeah, it is only $50/year/mailbox for the Premier account, but it seems silly to spend that without looking at options.
I’ve come up with two approaches so far:
- Export all the mail and then import it to a free hosted account
- Export all the mail and store it on a file server as text (.eml) documents
Option 1 is clearly a bit abusive of Google’s good graces, but you can easily get a free hosted account with a different domain. For instance, you might want to have one for contract and temp employees. The trick is making sure the export from the Enterprise account isn’t larger than what the free version can hold.
Well, the other trick is that the rules have recently changed and you can only have 20 users with the free accounts (although I’ve read that you can send an email and ask for additional…)
Option 2 means the onus is now on me to securely store all the old emails and ensure that they can be accessed or searched if necessary. Access has to be controlled, we don’t want the world browsing a former employee’s old email, right?
Arguably this is really a stalling topic before going to Option 1 – if I really want to do some serious searching, why not import the mail back into a free account and use the wonderful search facilities… but, I can also directly search the text files with a number of tools as well.
For both approaches, I’ve found the free Gmail Backup utility to be incredibly helpful. It works great for both the export and the import and does it all with IMAP and .eml text files.
I guess an Option 3 might be to investigate the Postini services. It looks rather interesting, but I’ve yet to talk to anyone using that, so if you have any experience please drop a comment or email. I think Premier comes with a limited version (details) so it looks like I’d have to spend some money for email retention above the default 90 days.
I’m generally pretty happy with my Option 2 route for now, but open to other ideas or best practices so please feel free to share. In this litigious world we work in, messing up email retention or compliance can sure be a disaster!
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March 2nd, 2009 
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We are running postini at one of my client sites that is on Google Apps and I am not impressed. The interface is one of the most confusing things I have ever used. They are mostly using it for the extra spam filtering, so I haven’t played with the email retention. Great question as I have been thinking about the same thing. You could creat one account that you just import all old email into, and label it all as you import it. then when you needed to find something you could search in that account based on labels related to which user the email came from. Then you would only have to pay $50 a year for one extra account for archiving purposes.
Hmm… you’re scaring me a bit since I’m planning on turning on Postini this Friday!
Just to muddy the waters for you… I’ve been a Postini company for years and I really love the service. We use it for both security and archival. I guess they had me in mind when they built it, as I don’t find the interface to be at all confusing.. But if you do have problems their support is really quite good. They sure beat the heck out of the Barracuda devices we used to run.. God did I have a hate in my heart for those stupid things.
The archival feature pretty much does what you would expect it to and not a whole lot more. Mail gets archived.. Mail can be searched for.. Mail can be exported to PSTs. My only real complaint with it is that it can be sloooowwwww..
If you are thinking of going the Postini route you might want to call ‘em up and ask for an interactive demo… See if the setup makes sense to you before you pull that trigger. It isn’t over priced, but it certainly is not cheap.
Good stuff, thanks. I think asking for the demo will be a good place to start (I still haven’t turned it on…)
is google aps same with google adsense? im kinda puzzle here
Hi Brandon – the only thing Google Apps and Google Adsense have in common is the “google” in their names. Check the link in the article to learn more about Apps.
What is the generally accepted period of time that administrators are keeping emails? Is it strictly based on company policy, or are there guidelines in IRS code, HIPAA, etc?
And if anyone knows of any specific compliance that requires times, can you pass that on to me (via comment response is fine)
Thanks! The retention of the ex-employee’s by regulation is something that is certainly good to know!
I revisited this post after almost nine months because I have to archive an old mailbox from Google apps. I had an idea for a third option. It has some pluses and minuses, but what about downloading it all with outlook to a PST, or with Thunderbird? maybe time consuming, but at least you have a local copy and you can search it or upload it later?
i have the perfect solution for this; figured it out when my client had me start to migrate his company to g.apps figuring out they weren’t ready yet; i didn’t want to loose all my work migrating 10GB of email.
when i set up any g.apps account i make a ‘catch all’ address that ‘catches’ any email whatsoever; when i had my own internal server i didn’t keep ‘550′ emails; but it’s really nice for when somebody ’swears’ they sent you and email and they did but the typo’d the name!
so; set up a catch-all email address and when a user leaves the company etc; you use the built-in migration tool and set it up to IMAP all the files to the ‘catch all’ address.
on the catch-all address; set up filters for in/out for any ‘archived’ user and they will each still have an inbox and outbox. you can get in-touch with me if you want more information; i will get an email if you post a reply.
coincidentally i just found this post because the same client finally is having me migrate all the users BACK to individual accounts. The system of the 8-in-one works so well ; a smaller company could easily have ONE or TWO g-apps-premier users and host 5-15 people.
now that the users are back to individual accounts; i’m leaving the ‘catch all’ as is; it will continue to grab a copy of every incoming and outgoing email for the whole company; it’s very powerful admin tool to track how many total emails going in/out etc and to get a very quick idea of which emails are going to 5 vs 2 vs 1 user.
it’s pretty much flawless; the one and only minor drawback is that outgoing emails are tagged with a header that you are using catchall as the sender (but doesn’t affect replies; the ‘from’ is undisturbed once you validate the user; before validating; gmail actually changes the ‘from’ to catchall@ in this case.
actually it’s not even a bad thing in a way; the extra header usually makes non-deliveries go back to the catchall and not the end user; so one admin. can follow many of those bounces w/o checking individual accounts!
-awr