Last Updated on 2013-07-18.
In many countries, companies are forced to archive their in- and outgoing e-mail data for 7 years. From technical view, this is normally no big deal, and of course it is useful.
If you have been administrating a local Exchange 2010 server, you maybe know it is quite simple to create a journaling rule and let deepinvent Mailstore store your mail archives.
But using Office 365, it gets a little bit more complex. You can create a journaling rule via web interface (if this feature is included in your Office 365 Plan), so every in- and outgoing mail is saved in the background. But the main problem is, you cannot create a journal mailbox.
Workaround
So you need an additional mail server for this mail box. This is also useful if you have some local services on your servers which send automated e-mails you cannot relay via an Office 365 account due to security restrictions.
I found a free light-weight mailserver which is easy to configure, stable and safe.
Download hMailserver from here.
(If you have activated Windows SMTP server, deactivate the service now.)
Install it on your local Windows server machine.
Configuration is simple. Add a local domain, maybe including a subdomain, e.g. “internal.yourdomain.com”, which you can use only for this purpose.
Then add an account “journal”.
It might be useful to enable logging, but you don’t have to.
Have a look at the status page to see warnings. This should be all.
Configure your firewalls: Open inbound SMTP port 25, don’t forget to open it on your Windows firewall, too.
Make sure you have the right DNS settings configured for your (sub)domain, including the MX entry. They have to point to your local, internal server.
Test the connection via telnet or via the hMailserver tool which you find under Utilities.
Send a test mail from your personal mail account (from another server) to your new journal mailbox, e.g. to [email protected]. You should see in the logs that it arrived. So your mailbox is ready to be connected with Office 365 and Mailstore.
Look at this MailStore tutorial. It explains how to create a journaling rule in Office 365 and how to configure your local MailStore software.
Hint: If you want to be notified from MS if there are problems connecting to your journal mailbox, and your e-mail address is not one of the Office 365 addresses, you have to add it to the contact list first, which is also accessible via the web admin interface.
Configure Mailstore: Please note that even if you connect to your local journal mailbox via IMAP, you must choose “Exchange Server” in MailStore config. Also the Office 365 users have to be created in MailStore, otherwise the mails cannot be stored separately in the storage archive.