Understanding mail archiving criteria and the archive database

You create an Archive Criteria policy settings document from within an Archive policy settings document. After you create archive criteria, you can use them in one or more archive policy settings documents.

Mail file criteria answer these questions:

  • How should documents be archived? Archiving can be a combination of copying old documents to an archive database and then performing clean-up tasks on the users mail file or else simply deleting old documents.
  • How should documents be cleaned up? Once documents have been copied to an archive database, you can either delete the copies that remain in the user's mail file, or reduce the size of the document.
  • Which documents should be cleaned up? You provide a definition of an "old document" by specifying age criteria, and then applying that age criteria either to all documents or all documents in specified folders.
Note: By default, the archive mail database is stored in the directory archive, located in the data directory. Archive is the default name for the archive directory. The default name format for a user's archive database file is a_xxxx.nsf, where a_ is the prefix and xxxx is the name of the mail database. The name of the archive database is based on a specified number of characters (the default is 50) from the user's mail file name. For example, for the end user John Smith, whose mail file is jsmith.nsf, the archive database name is a_jsmith.nsf.