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Archiving email from Google Mail for Business with IBM Content Collector

Question & Answer


Question

How can I use IBM Content Collector to archive email from Google Mail for Business in a compliance scenario, and what restrictions and limitations apply?

Answer

To configure Google Mail for Business to forward email to IBM Content Collector, see the document Mail routing and delivery: Guidelines and best practices. Follow the descriptions for Sending routing - Use dual delivery to deliver outbound mail to both Gmail and an external archiving server and Receiving routing - Use dual delivery to deliver mail to both Gmail and an external server.

You should always use SSL/TLS to secure the communication between IBM Content Collector and Gmail. To do so:

Configure sending routing for outbound email and receiving routing for inbound email and internal-receiving email. Add an additional header X-AFU-RECV-HEADER-JRNL:true to be included in every email that is sent to IBM Content Collector. This header triggers the extraction of the received header from the message in the IBM Content Collector SMTP Connector. If the header is not present, internal recipients of groups are not searchable.

Restrictions and limitations:

Unlike journaling, where all documents that are received or sent are stored in one central place for compliance, dual delivery delivers the original email to multiple mail servers. One of these mail servers is the IBM Content Collector SMTP Receiver.

This difference causes some restrictions and limitations for archiving and eDiscovery scenarios when Google mail for Business is used. These limitations become apparent in the following scenario:

Alice sends an email to a group named Marketing, which consists of Bob, Carol, and Dave. Dave is not part of the organization and has an external email account. Furthermore, Ted is added as BCC recipient to the email.

Mail systems that use journaling preserve one copy of the email that was sent in the journal, including information about who the email has been delivered to. That means that the information about who is part of the group Marketing is preserved with the email. In the Gmail dual-delivery scenario, the group expansion is done by Gmail. Because receiving routing is configured, IBM Content Collector receives a distinct email for each internal recipient, in addition to the sent copy that is delivered because of sending routing.

For the given example, IBM Content Collector receives the following copies:

  • The BCC copy for Ted. This copy includes BCC information for Ted.
  • The recipient copy for Bob and Carol.
As Dave is not part of the organization, there is no information in the data that IBM Content Collector receives that the email has also been delivered to Dave.

From an eDiscovery perspective, this means that all internal recipients are available for eDiscovery. However, there might be cases where external recipients are not available for eDiscovery, because they were part of a group.

Another limitation is that, as the IBM Content Collector SMTP Receiver receives multiple copies of the same email, some copies cannot be deduplicated. This problem occurs if the copies have slightly different receive dates. In this case, multiple instances of the email might be archived, while attachments can be deduplicated. As a result, searching for a group with eDiscovery Manager might display multiple results, one for each of the recipients.

[{"Product":{"code":"SSAE9L","label":"Content Collector"},"Business Unit":{"code":"BU053","label":"Cloud & Data Platform"},"Component":"Content Collector for Email","Platform":[{"code":"PF033","label":"Windows"}],"Version":"4.0","Edition":"All Editions","Line of Business":{"code":"LOB45","label":"Automation"}}]

Document Information

Modified date:
17 June 2018

UID

swg21648572

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