"Email Archiving" Describes Four Different Jobs
Most confusion in this market comes from one word covering four separate problems. Compliance journaling captures every message as it is sent or received. An in-place archive gives an active user more mailbox space. Departed-user archiving preserves a leaver's mail so the licence can be reclaimed. Backup restores a mailbox after something goes wrong. Products that solve one of these usually do not solve the others, and the pricing looks nothing alike.
Buying the wrong one is common, and it is expensive in a particular way: the tool works exactly as advertised, and still does not solve the problem you had.
This is a guide to telling them apart, what to check before you commit, and how to work out which you need.
The Four Jobs Compared
| What it does | Triggered by | Typical buyer | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Compliance journaling | Captures a copy of every message at the moment it is sent or received, into a tamper-evident store | Every message, continuously | Regulated firms with a supervision or retention obligation |
| In-place archive | Moves older mail out of the primary mailbox into a secondary archive the user can still browse | Age or mailbox size policy | Anyone hitting mailbox quota |
| Departed-user archiving | Preserves a leaver's mailbox so the account and licence can be released | An account being disabled or deleted | Any organisation with staff turnover |
| Backup | Restores a mailbox to a previous state | An incident, deletion or corruption | Anyone treating mail as a recoverable system |
The distinction that matters most commercially: journaling is per-message and continuous, departed-user archiving is per-person and episodic. A product priced for one will be badly priced for the other.
1. Compliance Journaling
The strictest form. A journal rule copies every inbound and outbound message into a separate store as it passes through, independently of what the user does with their copy. Delete the message from your mailbox and the journaled copy is unaffected.
This is what regulated industries mean by email archiving, and it exists because supervision and retention rules require a complete, unaltered record rather than whatever survived in the mailbox.
Assume you need this if a regulator, an exchange, or a supervisory body imposes a communications retention or review obligation on you. If nobody does, journaling is usually more machinery than the problem justifies.
2. The In-Place Archive
Microsoft's own answer for active users. Exchange Online Archiving gives a mailbox a secondary archive that the user reaches through the same Outlook interface, with a policy moving older mail across automatically.
It solves quota, not compliance and not offboarding. The archive is attached to a licensed mailbox, which means it exists for as long as somebody is paying for that user. It is covered in detail in Exchange Online Archiving, including which plans include it and what the limits are.
The common misunderstanding is treating it as a compliance archive. It is not tamper-evident, the user can delete from it, and it disappears with the licence.
3. Departed-User Archiving
The one most organisations discover last, usually while working out why the licence count never falls.
When someone leaves, their mail still matters: for handover, for regulatory or legal reasons, and because somebody will eventually ask what was agreed with a customer three years ago. The mailbox cannot simply be deleted, so the standard workaround is to keep paying for the licence, or convert it to a shared mailbox and hope the storage lasts.
Neither ages well. Microsoft's inactive mailbox feature preserves the mailbox without a licence, but only under specific hold conditions, and the nuances catch people out. The alternatives are compared in inactive vs shared vs archive mailbox and how to archive a shared mailbox.
The durable pattern is to move the leaver's mail out to storage you control, then release the licence. That is a different shape of product from journaling: it runs per departure rather than per message, and it is measured against licence cost rather than compliance obligation.
4. Backup Is Not Archiving
Worth stating plainly because vendors blur it. Backup answers "restore this to how it was". Archiving answers "keep this available for years". Backups have short retention and are optimised for recovery speed; archives have long retention and are optimised for searchability and cost.
Buying a backup product to satisfy a retention obligation is one of the more common expensive mistakes. The full comparison, including where Purview retention fits, is in Microsoft 365 backup vs archive vs retention.
Working Out Which You Need
Four questions resolve it in most cases.
Does a regulator require you to retain or supervise communications?
If yes, you need journaling, and the other three do not substitute for it.
Are users hitting mailbox quota?
That is an in-place archive problem, and Microsoft's own feature may be sufficient if your licences already include it.
Is your licence count higher than your headcount?
That is departed-user archiving, and it is the one with a directly measurable return, because every licence released is a recurring cost removed.
Are you trying to recover from deletion or corruption?
That is backup, not archiving.
Many organisations need two of these at once. What they rarely need is one product claiming to be all four.
What to Check Before You Buy
Whichever type you land on, five questions separate solutions that age well from ones that do not.
Where does the data physically live, and who owns the storage account?
If the archive sits in the vendor's tenant, leaving them later means a migration you pay for. If it sits in your own cloud storage, you keep the data whatever happens to the relationship.
Can you get it out, and in what format?
Ask specifically what an export produces and whether it is usable without the vendor's software.
What does retrieval cost?
Some archives are cheap to fill and expensive to read, either in fees or in rehydration delays from cold storage tiers. That matters most when an auditor or a legal request arrives, which is exactly when you cannot wait.
Does it preserve what makes the content admissible?
Metadata, timestamps, folder structure, attachments, and an audit trail of who accessed the archive and when.
What happens at the end?
A defensible archive can dispose of content on schedule as well as retain it. Retention without disposition eventually becomes its own liability.
What Email Archiving Costs, and Why Comparisons Mislead
Cost is the question buyers ask first and the one vendors answer least clearly, because the four jobs are priced on different units. Comparing headline figures across them produces a number that means nothing.
| Type | Usual pricing unit | What drives the bill |
|---|---|---|
| Compliance journaling | Per user per month, every user | Headcount, retention period, sometimes ingest volume |
| In-place archive | Per user per month, as a licence or included in a suite | How many users need it |
| Departed-user archiving | Per departure, plus storage | Turnover rate and how much data each leaver holds |
| Backup | Per user per month or per GB | Seats and retention |
Microsoft's own in-place archive add-on is commonly listed at around $3.00 per user per month on an annual commitment. If you are on E3 or above you are already paying for it whether you use it or not. On E1, F3, Business Basic or Standard, or Exchange Online Plan 1, adding it across a few thousand mailboxes becomes a real recurring line. Microsoft adjusts pricing and regional rates differ, so confirm the current figure before budgeting.
The costs that do not appear on the quote
Three of them, and they are usually larger than the difference between the vendors you were comparing.
The licence you keep paying. The most common hidden cost of not having departed-user archiving is retained licences. A leaver whose mailbox is kept alive costs a full seat every month indefinitely. Against that, the comparison is not vendor against vendor, it is the archiving cost against the licence cost you stop paying.
Retrieval. Some archives are cheap to fill and expensive to read, either as per-GB retrieval fees or as rehydration delay from cold storage tiers. That cost lands precisely when an auditor or a legal request arrives, which is when you have the least flexibility. Ask what a restore costs and how long it takes before signing.
Getting out. If the archive lives in a vendor's own tenant, leaving means a migration you pay for, on their timetable. An archive written to cloud storage you own has no exit cost, because there is nothing to exit. This is the single question that most changes the ten-year number and is almost never on a comparison chart.
A more useful comparison than price per user
Work out the annual cost of the problem before pricing the solution:
- Licences retained for leavers multiplied by twelve. This is usually the biggest number and the easiest to verify from your own admin centre.
- Storage you are buying to avoid quota problems that archiving would remove.
- Time spent on manual exports, PST handling, and answering "what did this person have" requests.
If a solution does not reduce one of those three, the price per user is beside the point.
Where SmiKar Fits, and Where It Does Not
Worth being direct, because this is a category where vague positioning wastes everybody's time.
SmiKar does not do compliance journaling. If you need every message captured as it is sent under a supervision obligation, the products built for that are the right answer and we are not one of them.
What Chipmunk does is the departed-user job. It watches Microsoft Entra ID, and when an account is disabled it archives that person's Exchange Online mail, OneDrive files and Teams chats into Azure Blob Storage in your own subscription, so the licence can be released cleanly. The archive stays searchable across every departed user, with an audit trail on every access, and retention and immutable tiers available because the storage is yours. Chipmunk deploys from the Azure Marketplace into your own Azure environment.
The reason that shape matters: the data is in storage you own, so there is no vendor holding it and no migration cost if you change your mind. The wider workflow is in Microsoft 365 departed user archiving.
On the SharePoint side, Squirrel does the equivalent for documents rather than mail, archiving inactive SharePoint content to your own Azure storage with stubs left in place.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the difference between email archiving and email backup?
Backup exists to restore a mailbox to a previous state after deletion or corruption, with short retention and fast recovery. Archiving exists to keep content available and searchable for years, with long retention and lower storage cost. A backup product will not satisfy a retention obligation, and an archive is a poor recovery tool.
Do I need email archiving if I already have Microsoft 365?
It depends which job you mean. Microsoft includes an in-place archive on some plans, which addresses mailbox quota for active users. It does not provide compliance journaling, and it does not preserve a departed user's mail once the licence is removed, because the archive is attached to the licensed mailbox.
What is journaling in email archiving?
A journal rule copies every message into a separate store as it is sent or received, independently of the user's own copy. Deleting the message from the mailbox does not affect the journaled copy. It is the strictest form of archiving and is typically driven by a regulatory supervision or retention requirement.
How do you archive a departing employee's email?
The durable approach is to capture the mailbox to storage you control before the licence is removed, then release the licence. Keeping the licence active preserves the mail but continues the cost indefinitely, and converting to a shared mailbox has its own storage limits. Microsoft's inactive mailbox preserves a mailbox without a licence but only under specific hold conditions.
How much does email archiving cost?
It depends which of the four jobs you are buying, because they are priced on different units. Compliance journaling is typically per user per month across every user. Microsoft's in-place archive add-on is commonly listed at around $3.00 per user per month on an annual commitment, and is already included at E3 and above. Departed-user archiving is priced per departure plus storage rather than per seat, so it scales with turnover instead of headcount. Comparing headline per-user figures between these types is misleading.
What should I look for in an email archiving solution?
Where the data physically lives and who owns the storage, whether you can export it in a usable format without the vendor's software, what retrieval costs in both fees and delay, whether metadata and audit trails are preserved so the content stays defensible, and whether it can dispose of content on schedule as well as retain it.
Is an in-place archive the same as an archive mailbox?
They are the same thing under different names. Microsoft's documentation and interfaces use "archive mailbox", "in-place archive" and "online archive" for the secondary mailbox attached to a licensed user, reached through the same Outlook client as the primary mailbox.
Related reading
- Exchange Online Archiving: licence, cost and limits
- Inactive vs shared vs archive mailbox
- How to archive a shared mailbox
- Microsoft 365 backup vs archive vs retention
- Microsoft 365 departed user archiving
- Export an Office 365 mailbox to PST
Start With the Job, Not the Product
Most bad email archiving purchases start by comparing products rather than deciding which of the four jobs needs doing. If yours is the departed-user problem, see how Chipmunk archives leavers into your own Azure storage. Questions: sales@smikar.com.
Mark Smith co-founded SmiKar Software in 2015 and has spent the past decade helping organisations solve Microsoft 365 data management challenges. He works with the SmiKar team to build solutions for SharePoint archiving, storage optimisation, governance and compliance, supporting customers from growing businesses through to Fortune 500 enterprises.
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