Tips for optimizing storage with smart email archiving

Everyone knows that email is indispensable. But with employees using email as the formal mode of communication, inboxes grow, servers become strained, and organizations are left looking for ways to manage storage. Businesses need a strategic approach to manage this growing problem. Email archiving is a common solution, but smart and efficient usage is vital to ensure that administrators aren’t unnecessarily burdened.

Smart email archiving goes beyond just storing emails. It’s about efficiently managing email data, reducing redundancy, and ensuring compliance, with optimal storage management at the core of it. In this article, we’ll explore practical, actionable tips to help you optimize storage using smart email archiving methods.

The email storage dilemma

Every day, businesses exchange millions of emails. According to Radicati Group's research, over 347 billion emails are sent and received daily across the globe in 2025. In an organizational context, the storage impact becomes massive.
Here's the problem:

• Emails accumulate over time, leading to sluggish servers and frustrated users.
• Employees store unnecessary emails “just in case” they’re needed later, often saving copies in multiple folders.
• IT teams scramble to manage storage spikes, increase storage limits, or invest in expensive add-ons or upgrades.
• Older emails are deleted to make space, only to realize they were needed for legal, operational, or compliance purposes.

Businesses commonly run into such scenarios. But using mailbox storage as a long-term repository is unsustainable. This is where email archiving steps in.

What is email archiving?

Email archiving is the process of capturing, indexing, and storing emails in a centralized, secure repository for long-term retention and easy retrieval. Archiving is used to preserve the content, metadata, and integrity of emails over time.
A robust email archiving solution typically offers:

• Automated retention of incoming and outgoing emails.
• Granular search for email retrieval.
• Tamper-proof storage for legal and compliance reasons.
• Retention policies configuration and lifecycle management.
• Audit trails and access control options.

With these features, organizations can handle email as structured information that serves as a singular source of truth rather than ungoverned data, optimizing storage while improving compliance.

Why does storage optimization matter?

Efficient storage management isn’t just about saving server space—it’s about improving productivity, reducing infrastructure costs, and ensuring that data is accessible when it’s required. Here are a few reasons why storage optimization is no longer a good-to-have, but a must-have.

Performance impact

The server's performance is severely impacted if years’ worth of emails are stored in the email service provider. The amount of attachments and other email data gathered over time leads to a massive buildup of storage, leading to slowness in general performance and email retrieval during searches. 

Cost management

The buildup of the amount of data stored in email servers forces admins to upgrade to a higher plan or purchase add-on storage for users. Storing years’ worth of data in the primary email server can be expensive to manage in the long run. Paying the additional storage cost is an unnecessary overhead for the company.

Compliance risk

When employees notice that they're running out of the allocated storage for their email account, they try to manage it by deleting older emails. Without the right awareness, they may end up deleting important emails that are mandated to be stored as part of the compliance and legal requirements set forth by regulatory bodies. 

Disaster recovery and business continuity

Even if a business is well-prepared to handle any unforeseen circumstances, there are instances where important data is lost or leaked. Having the right storage optimization measures included in archiving solutions will help in such situations and aid with disaster recovery and business continuity. 

Tips to optimize storage with email archiving

Optimizing email storage is vital to governing data efficiently for any organization. The solution to managing storage without any risk to the company is email archiving. Archiving ensures that data is safely stored and ready for retrieval whenever it’s requested. But without the right practices in place, archiving can become chaotic and haphazard. We'll guide you through certain tips that can help with managing emails for optimal storage in your email archiving solution. 

Communicate guidelines to employees

Email storage can be optimized only when everyone in the company is on the same page about the guidelines to be followed. Communicate clear guidelines to your employees for their business email account usage. For example, make it a rule that employees aren’t allowed to use their work email for personal reasons. 

Other guidelines about the types of emails that need to be stored and those that can be deleted should also be communicated. This ensures that important data that's mandated to be stored for compliance reasons isn’t accidentally deleted, and disposable data is cleared regularly. Clear communication about how companies handle their data and the measures they take for storage regulation will give clarity to employees about mandated data management practices.

Set definitive retention policies

The effectiveness of an archiving solution depends on how strategically it's implemented and used. Right from the implementation phase of the archiving solution, involve the right stakeholders to assess the amount of storage that'll be needed. You can pick the right plan based on these requirements. With the legal team in the loop, clearly document the types of emails to be stored in the archiving solution. This should be drafted based on the compliance regulations relevant to the company. 

Once all of these requirements are clear, set multiple retention policies for different sets of users based on the importance of their communications. This ensures that all legal and compliance requirements are taken care of, while retaining only important emails. Implementing policies without a clear duration or data types in mind leads to email bloat owing to the huge amount of data exchanged. 

Release legal holds on time

Businesses run into legal scenarios from time to time. When they're being questioned as part of a proceeding, businesses are required to produce evidence that may be present in their emails. In such scenarios, the admin places a hold on relevant emails. This is called a legal hold. When emails are retained as part of a legal hold, they remain archived even if the retention period is over. This leads to increased storage utilization. 

Even though email archiving simplifies the legal hold process, it needs to be properly managed to ensure storage issues don't arise. Involve your legal team in managing these legal holds and ensure that emails aren’t deleted ahead of time. Once your legal team gives the go-ahead, release the legal hold. As a precautionary measure, if there are doubts about the email being needed again, you can choose to export and save the emails locally. 

Explore data management options

A robust archiving solution offers measures to manage storage, both in the archiving solution and the email provider. Regularly oversee the data that's being retained and clear emails that aren’t required. The “export and delete” option is present in most archiving solutions. Use this feature to retain a secure copy of emails in your local system or storage devices if the email isn't deemed crucial. This clears up space in the archiving solution.

Similarly, most archiving solutions also offer the feature to allow users to view their archived emails. Admins can choose to enable this feature for certain users who are aware of secure email handling practices. This way, the users can identify emails that are retained in the archiving solution and clear them from their email provider storage, making way for newer incoming emails.

Integrate archiving with backup strategy

Email archives and backup solutions serve different purposes. While archiving serves as a long-term email retention service that aids in retrieval and compliance, backup solutions are snapshots of emails in real time that are helpful for disaster recovery and business continuity. Differentiate between the two and configure relevant policies. 

When used efficiently, archiving and backup strategies can complement each other well. Older emails are stored in the archiving solution and newer emails can be backed up for business continuity. This ensures there's no unnecessary overlap, helping with overall storage management. 

Prioritize data compression

While the organization's administrator can follow many practices to manage storage efficiently, picking an email archiving solution that has features to minimize the storage utilized is equally important. Robust archiving solutions offer two features that help with this—data deduplication and data compression. 

Data deduplication refers to the practice in which archiving providers store just one instance of an email that's present in multiple folders or group emails that are delivered to multiple users. In data compression, emails with large attachments are compressed with advanced algorithms that don't alter the integrity of the email. An archiving solution that offers these features plays a vital role in efficient storage management.

Educate users about attachment management

Attachments make up the bulk of email volume. Reducing the amount of attachments shared over email can significantly reduce the storage needed. While it's not practical to eliminate email attachments, employees can be asked to use file-sharing solutions like Zoho WorkDrive to upload files and manage them. They can simply embed the link of the relevant attachment in their email. This way, the storage used for email archive is reduced. 

With the data deduplication and compression features available in archiving solutions, the space taken up by retained attachments goes down significantly.

Review and revamp regularly

Optimizing storage and managing emails efficiently isn’t a one-time task. Based on the growing needs of your organization, the policies and guidelines implemented for your employees and archiving solution need to be continuously monitored and revamped. Adjust the retention duration based on changing compliance requirements, review the employees who have access to view their archived emails, narrow down policy filters to retain only the required emails, and regularly purge any data that may not be required. 

Regularly performing these maintenance activities ensures that archiving storage doesn't become a burden for your organization in the long run. 

Wrapping up

Email remains the backbone of business communication. Storage optimization isn’t just about saving space; it’s about working smarter. Smart email archiving gives organizations the power to control and clean email data without losing them or violating compliance regulations.

By following these practices, businesses can significantly reduce their email storage footprint while improving performance and efficiency. Whether you're a small business scaling up or an enterprise dealing with massive data volumes, smart archiving is one of the best investments you can make.

eProtect is a cloud-based email archiving and security solution that provides email archiving for cloud and on-premise email providers. The solution offers secure email archiving, quick eDiscovery, and data export to ensure that organizations stay compliant and guarantee data security. eProtect is the archiving solution powering Zoho Mail, a platform trusted by millions of users.