1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to processing electronic mail such as for archiving and retrieving.
2. Background Art
Electronic mail (e-mail) has become a mainstay of corporate and personal communications. Recent analyst figures show e-mail usage to be between 20-30 billion messages per day and growing at an annual rate of 29%. Individual accounts are estimated to receive an average of 7 MB daily. For moderate sized companies, an annual addition of roughly 20 TB of e-mail storage space is required. Electronic mail is no longer limited to text, but typically includes a variety of attachments including word processor files, spreadsheets, slide shows, pictures, video clips, audio clips, embedded graphics, design files, and the like. In addition to traditional e-mail, instant messaging is expected to have 180 million users sending 2 trillion messages per year in the near future.
Archiving and retrieving archived electronic mail has become a major concern for many corporations. Information technology departments may spend 25%-35% of their efforts archiving and recovering e-mail. In addition, recent government regulations require e-mail to be archived for at least six years in certain situations.
Due to the recent emphasis on e-mail and a probable need for later discovery, more enhanced searching techniques are being developed. Electronic mail indexing and metadata generation is typically performed on a mail server and/or an archive server. Current indexing schemes generally perform keyword indexing and concentrate on common information such as the sender, receiver, time sent, time received, time read, and the like. There indexing methods are insufficient to handle the increasing workload. New and enhanced searching techniques are being developed that will link similar concepts described with different vernacular. Even more futuristic systems are being researched that will better respond to user criteria, span concepts and link related ideas not possible with simple keyword searching.
New types of content indexing are processor intensive and will likely impose a greater burden on mail servers and/or archive servers. The type and amount of processing that must be done in order to yield desired results in a timely fashion combined with the abilities of servers and server software will introduce a significant bottleneck in the e-mail system. What is needed is an alternative to the traditional e-mail server configuration.