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
Connect Your Mailbox
How you connect depends on your provider. For Microsoft 365, AutoArchive Mail connects via OAuth — you approve access through Microsoft's own sign-in, and no password is ever entered or seen by us. For Gmail, personal Outlook.com, and any other IMAP-compatible provider, you generate an app-specific password instead — a scoped credential, never your main account password. Either way, 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.
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.
Set Your Archiving Preferences
You define what gets captured and how — the age threshold for historical mail (commonly 30, 60, or 90 days, or any custom value you choose), which folders to include or exclude, and whether to process sent mail, received mail, or both. You also choose what happens to the original email in your mailbox once it's been archived: leave it exactly where it is, move it into a dedicated folder within your mailbox so you can verify it was captured, or delete it from the mailbox entirely. This is entirely your choice, and can be changed at any time. 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.
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.
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
Personal Outlook.com
Connects via app-specific password and IMAP, the same as Gmail. Works with personal Outlook.com and Hotmail accounts.
Gmail & Google Workspace
Connects via app-specific password and IMAP. Works with personal Gmail and Google Workspace accounts.
Microsoft 365
Connects via OAuth to Exchange Online mailboxes — no password is ever entered. Tested running multiple shared mailboxes concurrently.
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
Scoped access only — never your main password
AutoArchive Mail never sees or requests your master account password. For Microsoft 365, access is granted via OAuth through Microsoft's own sign-in. For Gmail, personal Outlook.com, and other IMAP providers, it's a scoped app-specific password generated just for this purpose. Either way, revoking access from your provider's security settings immediately breaks the connection.
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 control what happens to the original
Archiving to your storage destination is separate from what happens to the original email in your mailbox. You choose: leave it in place, move it into a dedicated in-mailbox folder so you can double-check it was captured, or delete it from the mailbox once archived. Deletion is irreversible once it happens, so choose the setting that matches your organization's own retention policy.
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.
Does it remove the original email from my mailbox?
Only if you configure it to. You choose what happens to each archived email once it's captured: leave it in your mailbox untouched, move it into a dedicated folder within your mailbox so you can verify it was archived, or delete it from the mailbox entirely. All three options are available and it's entirely your choice — we'd recommend picking whatever matches your organization's own retention policy.
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?
Depends on your provider. For Gmail, personal Outlook.com, or other IMAP accounts, no — if you can log into your email provider's settings and generate an app-specific password, you can complete the setup yourself. For Microsoft 365, connecting via OAuth typically requires an admin to approve access to the mailbox(es) being archived, so your IT team (or whoever administers your Microsoft 365 tenant) will need to be involved for that step. Either way, we offer a setup call to walk through the connection if you'd rather not do it solo.
Ready to build your archive?
Sign up online — we'll set you up within 2 weeks, then your 14-day free trial begins.