In the short term stubbing can seem like the perfect silver bullet, as Mailbox sizes and backup times are reduced considerably, but the Exchange Administrator soon realises what long term affects stubbing has on server maintenance and the overall effect on efficiency of client performance. Server health and client performance is governed by the number of files in Exchange so when Mailboxes eventually fill up with thousands upon thousands of small “stubs”, it has disastrous consequences for the Exchange Administrators to deal with.

It’s no wonder then that Microsoft advises that stubbing should not be used when archiving in Exchange, “…these [Email Archiving] solutions should be configured to move the e-mail content out of the Mailbox without retaining stub files in the Mailbox” (full article here). This is something that Mailsafe complied with even before the article was released, as we here at Techne-Comm understood the disadvantages of using stubbing in an email archiving solution.

According to research conducted by YouGov and OfCom, 58% of workers in the UK use a mobile device, so having mobile access to an email archive would seem logical. In the TechNet article however, Microsoft explain that if an email archiving solution uses stubbing, users will not be able to retrieve emails from the archive when they are on a mobile device, as the mobile device does not have a plugin to read the pointers.

If your archiving solution uses stubbing, migrating can prove difficult as well. If you had 5 years’ worth of stubs in each users Mailbox within your company, the dramatic increase in temporary Exchange space that you will need to restore all of the stubs for migration could potentially be crippling.

Mailsafe entered the market in 2005, and since then, it has never used stubbing techniques to archive emails. We here at Techne-Comm understand why Microsoft advises against using the technique, which is why we avoid it.

The Mailsafe Email Archive Solution is available for all industries and can be accessed via its own Web App, unlike many offerings which use stubbing to access emails in the archive.