Managing Message Lifetimes in Artisan Mailbox Manager

ArtiSan archives are single-instance stores. If the same message is found in two different mailboxes, only one copy of the message is stored in the archive. This substantially reduces the size of the archive. Single instance works both within a mailbox store and across stores (unlike the single instance mechanism in Exchange). ArtiSan can also store messages from a sender's mailbox that contain BCCs, but these are retained as a seperate instance to ensure that the BCCs remain invisible to the recipients when viewing items from the archive.

ArtiSan is also responsible for managing the lifetime of items in the archive. Every rule in the system has an associated retention time either specified as part of the rule or as a general, system-wide configuration. When a rule fires, indicating that an item needs to be archived, the system makes a note of the retention period that is part of the rule. If the item being archived is the first instance, ArtiSan stores the retention date in the database for use by the Retention Policy Manager (RPM). If the item is a new instance of an existing item in the archive, ArtiSan stores the longer of the two retention periods. So, for instance, if the same message is in two mailboxes and rules fire indicating a retention of 3 years and 5 years respectively, the system sets the retention period of the item in the store to be 5 years.

Tools are provided with the system to allow Retention periods to be recalculated.

Retention Policy Management is performed by the Migrator module. Migrator works in the background to identify items that need to be moved or deleted from the store and deletes them as necessary. In addition, to disposing of items which have exceeded their retention period, the RPM is also responsible for managing the location of items across multiple stores. For customers who need manual or external control of disposition, the disposition function can be turned off.

There are also administrative facilities, located in the search page, to allow customers to specifically identify messages in the archive that should either be held (not deleted irrespective of the retention time) or to be immediately deleted. During this operation the items are marked in the database as being held or deleted by the Administrator.

It is possible that a deleted item could still have a stub located in a user's mailbox folder. These stubs for deleted items are called "orphans". ArtiSan provides facilities for manipulating orphans. You can choose to delete the orphan or to restub it with a message indicating why the item was deleted.