Migrating to Hexamail Vault: A Step-by-Step Guide

Hexamail Vault Features: Encryption, Retention, and SearchHexamail Vault is a purpose-built email archiving solution designed to help organizations meet compliance, legal discovery, and operational needs while reducing risk and storage costs. This article explores its core features—encryption, retention, and search—along with related capabilities, deployment considerations, and real-world use cases.

What Hexamail Vault Is Designed For

Hexamail Vault aims to provide a reliable, tamper-proof archive of email and attachments that supports regulatory compliance (e.g., SEC, FINRA, GDPR), legal eDiscovery, and internal investigations. It is built to retain messages in a way that preserves metadata and audit trails while enabling administrators and authorized users to find and export messages quickly.

Encryption: Protecting Archived Email

• Strong data protection: Hexamail Vault supports encryption to protect archived emails both at rest and in transit. This reduces the risk of unauthorized access to sensitive communications.
• Key management: The product typically offers configurable key management options. Organizations can use built-in keys managed by the appliance/software or integrate with external key management systems and hardware security modules (HSMs) for stricter control.
• Access controls: Encryption is paired with role-based access controls (RBAC) and authentication integrations (LDAP/Active Directory, SSO) so that only authorized personnel can decrypt and access archived data.
• Secure transport: When transferring data between mail servers, capture agents, and the archive, Hexamail Vault uses secure channels (e.g., TLS) to prevent interception.
• Audit logging: All access and administrative actions related to encryption and key usage are recorded in audit logs to support forensic review and compliance reporting.

Retention: Preserving Messages for Compliance

• Policy-driven retention: Hexamail Vault allows administrators to define retention policies based on user, group, message type, metadata, or compliance requirements. Policies determine how long messages are stored and whether they can be deleted or must be preserved immutably.
• Legal hold and litigation support: The platform supports placing specific mailboxes, users, or items on legal hold to prevent deletion during investigations or litigation. Holds can be applied selectively and tracked.
• Immutable storage options: For strict regulatory environments, Hexamail Vault can be configured to store messages in an immutable state where deletion is prevented for the retained period.
• Automated retention lifecycle: Policies can automatically move, archive, or purge messages at the end of their lifecycle, reducing storage costs and administrative overhead.
• Reporting and compliance exports: Built-in reports show retention compliance across the organization and can produce exports for auditors or regulators.

Search: Fast, Accurate eDiscovery

• Full-text indexing: Hexamail Vault indexes message bodies, headers, attachments, and metadata to provide full-text search capabilities across the entire archive.
• Advanced query support: Administrators and authorized users can execute complex queries using Boolean operators, phrase search, wildcards, date ranges, sender/recipient filters, attachment types, and more.
• Attachment parsing: Common attachment types (PDF, DOCX, XLSX, etc.) are parsed and indexed so their contents are searchable.
• Faceted search and filters: Search results can be refined using facets such as mailbox, date, sender, recipients, tags, and retention labels.
• Relevance ranking and preview: Results are ranked for relevance, and quick previews allow users to inspect messages and attachments without exporting.
• Export and chain-of-custody: Search results can be exported in formats suitable for eDiscovery (PST, EML, PDF) with accompanying metadata and audit trails that preserve chain-of-custody for legal admissibility.

Related Capabilities

• Capture methods: Hexamail Vault can capture emails via journaling from mail servers, SMTP capture, or client-side agents, ensuring comprehensive coverage.
• Storage and scalability: The solution supports scalable storage architectures — on-premises appliances, virtual machines, or hybrid cloud deployments — to accommodate growing email volumes.
• Deduplication and compression: To optimize storage, Hexamail Vault includes deduplication and compression technologies that reduce redundancy and disk usage.
• APIs and integrations: Integration with SIEM, compliance, and backup systems via APIs and connectors enables centralized workflows and automation.
• User access and self-service: Depending on configuration, organizations can enable secure self-service access for end users to retrieve archived messages, subject to policy and auditing.
• Monitoring and alerting: Real-time monitoring and alerting for archive health, policy violations, and system events help administrators maintain reliability.

Deployment Considerations

• Compliance requirements: Verify that Hexamail Vault’s retention, encryption, and eSI/forensics features meet your industry-specific regulatory needs (finance, healthcare, government).
• Storage planning: Estimate mailbox counts, average message size, retention period, and attachment volumes to size storage and forecast growth.
• Backup and disaster recovery: While archive systems are resilient, plan backups and DR strategies that cover configuration, keys, and stored data.
• Performance tuning: Indexing and search performance depend on CPU, memory, and disk I/O. Allocate resources accordingly for search responsiveness and ingestion throughput.
• Security posture: Integrate with your IAM, use strong key management, enforce least privilege, and regularly review audit logs and access patterns.

Typical Use Cases

• Regulatory compliance: Meeting retention and supervision rules for industries subject to audit and oversight.
• eDiscovery and legal response: Quickly searching, exporting, and producing email evidence with preserved metadata and audit trails.
• Data loss prevention and forensics: Investigating incidents, reconstructing timelines, and rooting out policy violations.
• Storage optimization: Offloading older email from production servers to a compressed, deduplicated archive.

Example Workflow: From Capture to Production

1. Capture: Emails are journaled from the mail server and securely transmitted to Hexamail Vault.
2. Indexing: Messages and attachments are parsed and indexed for full-text search.
3. Retention: Policies tag messages with retention labels and, if applicable, apply legal holds.
4. Search: Authorized users perform targeted searches with filters and export relevant items.
5. Export: Results are exported with metadata and audit logs to maintain chain-of-custody for legal use.

Conclusion

Hexamail Vault combines encryption, policy-driven retention, and robust search to deliver a comprehensive email archiving solution suitable for compliance-driven organizations and legal teams. Its related features—scalable storage, deduplication, secure capture, and integrations—round out a platform that reduces risk while enabling efficient eDiscovery and long-term data governance.