Several years ago, Saint John Vianney Network Administrator Tom McKenna moved the school’s email system to Gmail, which Google provides for free to schools and universities as part of its Google Apps for Education offering. Since Gmail is a hosted service, Saint John Vianney was spared the expense and hassle of installing and managing a mail server. It provides all Saint John Vianney’s staff with 7.3 + GBs of storage, built-in IM, voice and video chat, mobile access, spam and virus protection, IMAP, POP.

While Gmail’s generous free storage provision ensured that Saint John Vianney didn’t have to worry about over flowing mailboxes, it did not include a hosted archiving service that would meet the school’s seven-year email retention policy.  McKenna’s next step was to find and install an affordable email archiving system that would complement the school’s new Gmail system.