Transcript of CanIt Archiver video

Video Introduction to CanIt Archiver

Date: July 2011


  • David F. Skoll, President, Roaring Penguin Software Inc
  • W.L. (Bill) White, Vice-President Sales and Marketing

Video Location: The Video



Bill White: Thanks for joining us today. My name is Bill White, I'm the VP of Sales at Roaring Penguin Software. And we're joined by David Skoll who's the President and CTO of Roaring Penguin.

David Skoll: Hi.

BW: Today we're introducing our new CanIt Archiver program. It's an email archiving and email continuity software. David, maybe I can get you to talk a little bit and just give us the high level view of what CanIt Archiver is.

DFS: CanIt Archiver is an add-on for our CanIt filtering software that makes a local copy of all the good mail, and indexes it so that later on you can go to the web interface and search your archived email through Retrieved Messages. And that's it in a nutshell.

BW: I mentioned the email continuity; what do we mean by email continuity in this context?

DFS: Right. What we mean by that is... Let's say your back-end mail server is down for some reason. You can still log into the CanIt web interface and access your mail archive. And this includes any mail that happens to arrive while your back-end mail server is down.

So if you're expecting time-sensitive email, you can access it through the Archiver even if your back-end server's down.

BW: At Roaring Penguin, we're known for email filtering. Maybe you could talk a little bit about how CanIt Archiver fits into that kind of an environment.

DFS: Sure. So let's start with just with CanIt first, the filtering product. Email arrives at the CanIt Host from the internet. The host is typically the MX for the domain. Our software filters the mail, quarantines the spam and forwards all the good mail onto the back-end mail server. When a user wants to read his or her email, the user logs onto the mail server just as usual and reads the email.

With Archiver added, in addition to delivering all the good mail to the back-end mail server, CanIt keeps a copy in the Archive. So let's say the back-end mail server goes down for some reason; end-users can log onto the CanIt web interface and view their mail in the Archive. While the back-end mail server is down, we're continuing to archive mail and also queuing it so that when the back-end mail server comes back, all the queued mail gets delivered.

BW: I think at this point, probably it's best to just do a quick demo and have a look at what we're talking about.

DFS: I'm going to log into the CanIt web interface here. And click on the Archived Mail tab. And I'm going to run a search.

Now a search can be as simple as looking for key words in the "subject" or you can make more complex searches. So I've made a more complex search for the demo purpose. And you can see here it contains three different matches combined with "AND" and "AND NOT". And
I've saved this search. That's another feature, you can make these "searches" and then save for re-use later.

BW: These things can be really quite complex - for instance, can it handle Boolean searches?

DFS: Yes. So I'll run the search.

BW: Sure.

DFS: And it shows all of the messages in the archive that match. And then to view a message, I just click on the "Subject", and it shows me the message.

Now let's say the back-end mail-server is down and I need a copy of this message.

I can say re-deliver message; at the moment, it will go to my real email address. But if I want, I can send it to my GMail account instead and have access to the message.

BW: Nice.

DFS: Another thing you can do is look at "Related Messages". So if this message were part of a thread with replies and further replies, clicking on "Related Messages" would show you all of the message thread.

BW: So if I want to find something and I can remember that I was talking with this person at... roughly this date, then I can follow that thread and get the exact message that I want to find.

DFS: Yes, exactly.

BW: Now people do email archiving because they have business requirements. We have a policy, we archive our own internal mail for "x" number of years. Today, people are facing regulatory requirements. You know, they have to deal with a Freedom of Information Act, or SOX or HIPAA, or whatever. Does CanIt Archiver make it easy for a system administrator to kind of meet these regulatory requirements as well as their own internal policies?

DFS: Yes, exactly. Here, I show you the configuration screen for archiving.

The first thing you can do is: do you want archiving? For example, if you're a college or a school, you might want to archive your staff and teacher's emails, but not your student's emails. So you can turn it on or off.

You can say how long you want to retain the archived mail for, which can range from a month to forever. And so, you can meet any kind of regulatory requirement.

BW: What about storage? Email itself typically is really, relatively, small.

DFS: Yes.

BW: But if we're starting to store all the email for all the company, does this start to build into some serious numbers?

DFS: Yes, it can. There are three factors that influence the storage. That's the number of messages per day that you're archiving, the average size of the message, and how long you want to keep it for. This can add up quite significantly for medium-sized companies.

We have a few things that can help limit that growth. The first is, if you routinely deal with large attachments that you might not want archived, like videos or CAD drawings, you can set a maximum attachment size. So any attachment larger than that won't get archived. The second thing we do is, before we store anything on the disk, we compress it. That saves you, typically, about 30%. And the last thing we do is we de-duplicate messages. So if the same message comes in for multiple recipients we only keep one copy, not one per recipient.

BW: Nice. Now the other issue is security. I want to be able to know... I want to be confident that my employee can see his or her email - no problem, but I don't want her to be able to see somebody else's email.

DFS: Right. And CanIt enforces that. End users can only see their own archive; they can't see somebody else's.

The system administrator can see all the archives, just as they are able to see all the email on the back-end server.

In our CanIt-Domain-PRO product, we have what's called Realm Administrators who can only see archived emails for their realm. So for example, if two different companies are hosted on the same CanIt server, they can't see each others' archives but they can see their own archives.

The other thing about the archiving is that it's read-only. Once something is in the archive, it can't be deleted, it can't be altered.

BW: I'm relatively paranoid; but I want to be able to know who's been... if anybody's actually accessed my mail, if anybody's actually viewed my email.

DFS: Right. And we keep a complete audit trail of that information.

If I go back to the archive message and click on the "Access History" link, it shows me the date and time and who accessed the message and from what IP address. So you can see exactly who's been looking at the Archive.

BW: What about the oddball cases. For example, I sent a server for repair and it happened to include the Archive; or, somebody hacked into my system; what kind of security level have I got there?

DFS: Well, what CanIt does is it stores the archive on an encrypted file system. So let's say you do send your machine back for warranty repair or something. Whoever gets the disk can access all of the encrypted files, but they won't be able to decrypt them. So they're not useful for obtaining any information about the archived mail.

BW: Right. CanIt again is normally thought of as a gateway product. So, we've seen the inbound email, we've seen the outbound email; but what about internal?

DFS: Internal email normally wouldn't be seen by CanIt. But a number of mail servers have a feature called "message journaling" which lets you copy all messages flowing them to another address. And CanIt hooks into this feature. So we can archive inbound, outbound and internal email. And using the "related messages" feature, we can group it into threads so that you can see everything.

BW: Great! Well, thanks David; I think we'll wrap it up there. If you want to get more information on CanIt Archiver, go to, click on the CanIt Archiver link and get a free trial. We have a 30-day free trial available. Or if you just want to email us, you can email us at

Thanks for viewing this video.

DFS: Yes. Thank you.