EMail archiving solutions

[stoofa]

Seeking some possible suggestions for an email arching solution.

We run Exchange Server 2003.

Windows users connect via "Exchange Protocols" using Outlook 2007
Linux Users connect via "IMAP" using various clients such as kmail & Thunderbird

What we are looking for is an archiving solution that allows for mail to be archived.
However retrieval is done via the mail client rather than by external links to a web application.
We've seen numerous solutions where old, archived mail is replaced with a URL which when clicked on displays the message in a Browser.
We want those archived messages to be visible within the client software.

The solution we are looking to move AWAY from is Symantec EVault which has proved to be the worst £5k we ever spent.
The client software crashes on a regular basis, client performance is dire.
Also the IMAP connectors for our Linux users simply don't work.
Oh and we do have some PGP encrypted mail which the Symantec system also has problems with.

Does anyone know of an archiving solution that will archive Exchange Server but allow easy access to both Windows and Linux clients?

 

[stoofa]

The big problems we've experienced with EV are:

IMAP clients often have truncated emails, with no way of accessing the archived content.
PGP encrypted emails are truncated, and therefore unreadable as they cannot be decrypted.
Laptop based Outlook clients often have issues with Valkyrie.dll crashing and have to disable the add-in.
Some laptop users report a substantial performance impact when archiving is taking place and the offline vault is being updated.

We've raised support issues on all of the above.
Symantec now tell us the IMAP connectors are not oficially supported, so they won't offer us any help on those (despite us specifically explaining we had 50/50 Windows & Linux users who would need to use this system)
Apparently there is now a PGP module that should work, but a nice extra charge for it - again, we were told this was all included when we purchased.

In response to the other issues it has been suggested we pay them more money and upgrade to the latest version of the software.
So after spending around £5k on a system that has never worked for us, Symantec's answer is to throw more money at the problem and hopefully that will solve it.

So I think we'll take a look at some of the alternatives - see what is out there.