Capture and coverage
Identify which messages, users and routes must be captured, including any journaling, external sending services and archive connectors. Define how capture gaps will be detected.
Email archiving and retention
Preserve and retrieve business email through audits, investigations and organisational change.
Technical design and implementation with your legal, compliance and records owners.
Keep the records you need. Be able to produce them.
A mailbox move, a departing employee or an archive renewal can raise the same question: which records must remain available, and who will be able to find them?
We turn the requirements approved by your legal, compliance and records owners into a technical design, with capture, retention, access and retrieval checks.
Agree the obligation before configuring the product.
There is no universal rule requiring every corporate email to be kept for seven years. For records within its scope, FCA SYSC 10A specifies five years, extendable to seven at the FCA’s request. Other records and sectors require their own assessment.
The ICO’s storage-limitation guidance requires retention to be justified and reviewed. Keeping everything indefinitely creates a different problem. Your compliance owner sets the applicable record classes, periods and exceptions; we implement and test the approved settings.
The decisions we bring into the design.
Retention and preservation
Map the approved schedules, deletion rules and hold responsibilities. Record how exceptions are authorised and how conflicting settings are resolved on the selected platform.
Search and export
Agree who may search, how access is audited and which retrieval/export scenarios must be demonstrated. Test representative records against the agreed requirements.
Migration and retirement
Plan how historical records remain accessible through a platform or archive change. Confirm evidence, ownership and approval before retiring a source system.
Separate preservation from recovery.
An archive, an online mailbox archive, a retention policy and a recovery service have different purposes. Google states that Vault is not a backup or archive tool. We establish the required capability before choosing the product or migration route.
The design records both the retention requirement and any separate recovery requirement, including how each will be tested. For Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, licensing and supported export or restore behaviour are checked during discovery.
A scoped records project.
We can assess an existing arrangement, design a new archive integration or plan preservation through an acquisition. Discovery produces the requirements-to-control mapping, proposed design, validation plan and implementation quotation.
Legal opinions, regulatory certification and specialist archive-format conversion are outside the standard mailbox-migration price. The project order identifies the approved requirements and the evidence needed for acceptance.
Technical and regulatory references
Checked 19 October 2026. The service scope above is our proposed delivery approach. These references explain the technical constraints and regulatory distinctions.
Scope your records project.
Tell us about the environment and the outcome you need.