Going Mobile with MailStore Server

There is no doubt that email is one of the most important methods of communication in business. For this reason, all emails created or processed by a particular company are subject to compliance obligations. With our software for email archiving, managers of small and medium-sized businesses can ensure compliant email archiving. Employees who spend much of their day on the go, such as sales representatives, can also use MailStore Server to access archived emails on mobile devices.

Lars Godesberg, Systems Engineer at MailStore, explains how it all works:

MailStore Server provides employees with a number of different ways to access the archive, including the native interface for the MailStore Client, the Outlook Add-in, the web interface, and the integrated IMAP server. All of these interfaces can also be used to access the archive on a mobile device.

Currently, MailStore Server can only be accessed using the internal LAN. A number of measures have to be put in place to allow employees who are not connected to the LAN to access the archive. There are a few different ways to make this possible.

Administrators could set up a port forward in the company firewall that is connected to the MailStore Server. In the firewall, the port forwarding function can be found under ‘Port Forwarding,’ ‘Destination-NAT,’ or ‘DNAT.’ If the administrators do not wish to place the MailStore Server in the DMZ, it is also possible to use a reverse proxy upstream from the server where the MailStore is installed and place this in the DMZ. The forwarding on the firewall naturally has to be set to direct to the reverse proxy.

To prevent users from having to remember two IP addresses or host names in order to access the archive, it is recommended that users simply access the archive using the host name. The DNS server then resolves the host name into the internal IP address within the LAN; outside of the LAN, that same host name is resolved into the external IP of the firewall. This setup is referred to as ‘split DNS.’

If there is no top-level domain available, it is also possible to use a DynDNS service so that a unique name can be selected.

If the employees are connected to the LAN via a VPN tunnel, no further configuration is required and users can simply access archived emails from their mobile devices.

When the user does not have access to the Internet, the MailStore administrator or a user with export authorization can export the relevant archive as a PST file and link this file with the employee’s Outlook profile, allowing the employee to access the email archive, even without Internet access.
When exporting the PST files, it is important to take the normal PST size limitations into account. For newer versions of Outlook, the limit is either 20 GB or 50 GB. If another email client is being used as Outlook, the archive can also be exported in the form of EML files which can be read with any current email program.

In case of additional questions on the mobile use of MailStore Server, please feel free to contact our support team at [email protected].

You would like to test MailStore Server? No problem! Please download your free trial version here.