How It Works

Audit-Ready Email Archives in 48 Hours. Zero Maintenance After That.

Connect your mailbox, choose where your emails are stored, and AutoArchive Mail does the rest — capturing every message automatically, continuously, without intervention.

What Breaks Without It

Most professional services firms reach a compliance moment — an audit request, a client dispute, a regulatory inquiry — and discover that their email history is technically intact but practically inaccessible. The emails exist. Finding the right ones, quickly, reliably, with full context including attachments and headers, is another matter entirely.

The manual alternative looks like this: periodic exports from Outlook or Gmail, usually incomplete and inconsistently named. Folders organised by one person's logic, searched by another. Emails forwarded to shared drives and then duplicated, misrouted, or never sent. Outgoing mail is often missed entirely, because most export tools capture only what arrived, not what was sent. When correspondence spans years or multiple staff members, the gaps compound.

The failure points are predictable but the consequences are serious. Missing a key piece of correspondence during an audit raises questions about whether your records management meets the standards your profession requires.

Five Steps from Setup to Audit-Ready

1

Connect Your Mailbox

You connect AutoArchive Mail to your email account using an app-specific password — the same mechanism used by email clients like Outlook and Thunderbird. Your master account password is never requested, never entered, and never stored. The connection can be revoked at any time from your email provider's security settings. Works with Outlook, Gmail, Microsoft 365, and any IMAP-compatible provider.

2

Configure Your Storage Destination

You choose where your archived emails are saved — a local folder on your own machine or server, a network share or NAS, or a cloud storage location such as an S3-compatible bucket, OneDrive, or Google Drive. Your emails never pass through or rest on AutoArchive Mail's servers. They go directly from your mailbox to your chosen destination. Your archive is yours, in your infrastructure, under your control.

3

Set Your Archiving Preferences

You define what gets captured and how — the age threshold for historical mail, which folders to include or exclude, and whether to process sent mail, received mail, or both. Reference ID extraction rules can be configured so that matter numbers, client codes, or file references embedded in subject lines are automatically parsed into the filename. Most setups take under ten minutes to configure.

4

Go Live — Archiving Begins Immediately

Once connected and configured, archiving begins. The initial run processes your historical mail according to the threshold you set. After that, new mail is captured on a continuous basis — typically within minutes of arrival or sending. There is nothing to run manually, no scheduled exports to remember, no maintenance window required. AutoArchive Mail runs quietly in the background and keeps your archive current without any ongoing intervention from you.

5

Retrieve Anything, Instantly

Every archived email is saved as a complete .MSG file using a clean, structured filename. Because filenames follow a consistent, human-readable convention and reference IDs are extracted at capture time, finding any email is a matter of a standard file search — no proprietary viewer required, no database to query.

2024-11-15_ClientName_Matter-Ref-0192_invoice-query.msg

A Complete, Faithful Record

Incoming mail

Every message received to configured accounts and folders

Outgoing mail

Sent items captured at the time of sending — not just received mail

Attachments

Saved intact within the .MSG file — no stripping or compression

Full email headers

Sender, recipient, timestamps, message IDs, routing data

Email metadata

Subject, date, thread references, read/unread status

Extracted reference IDs

Matter numbers and client codes parsed into searchable filenames

Works With What You Already Use

Microsoft Outlook

Direct integration via IMAP/Exchange protocols. Compatible with desktop Outlook and Exchange-hosted accounts.

Gmail & Google Workspace

Connects via app-specific password and IMAP. Works with personal Gmail and Google Workspace accounts.

Microsoft 365

Fully supported. Connects to Exchange Online mailboxes via modern authentication. Compatible with shared mailboxes.

Any IMAP Provider

If your email provider supports IMAP — Zoho Mail, Fastmail, self-hosted servers — AutoArchive Mail can connect to it.

How We Handle Access and Data

App-specific passwords only

AutoArchive Mail connects using a scoped credential generated specifically for this purpose — not your master account password. Delete the app password from your email provider's settings and the connection is immediately broken.

Credentials are never stored

The authentication credential used to access your mailbox is used to establish the connection and is not retained on our systems. We have no persistent access to your email account.

Your data goes directly to your storage

Captured emails are written to your configured destination — your server, your cloud bucket, your network share — and do not transit through or rest on AutoArchive Mail infrastructure.

You stay in control

At any time, you can revoke the mailbox connection, delete the app password, or cancel your subscription. Your archive remains yours and stays in your storage regardless of your subscription status.

Common Questions

Does it capture emails I've already sent and received, or only new ones going forward?

Both. On first run, AutoArchive Mail processes your existing mail back to whatever date threshold you configure — so your historical correspondence is captured from the start. After that, all new incoming and outgoing mail is archived on a continuous basis.

What happens to my archive if I cancel my subscription?

Nothing. Your archive lives in your storage and stays there. AutoArchive Mail doesn't hold your emails, so cancelling your subscription simply stops new emails from being captured — it has no effect on the archive you've already built.

Do I need to involve my IT team to get set up?

For most firms, no. If you can log into your email provider's settings and generate an app-specific password, you can complete the setup yourself. The process is designed to be completed in under an hour without technical assistance. For firms with more complex infrastructure, we offer a 30-minute setup call to walk through the connection.

Ready to build your archive?

Start your free 14-day trial. No credit card required. Go live in 48 hours.