@27629 Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes do a pretty good job of indexing the message bodies, but I don't think either product actually indexes attachments. Most email archiving solutions provide the ability to enable a full index so that later on you can search for specific emails without having to crawl through countless messages looking for keywords. A master index enables almost instantaneous searches across your entire email archive.
Why is this important? It's important for the employee because we've found that employees do reuse old content and attachments, and they spend a lot of time looking for those emails. Without indexing, employee productivity would suffer as more time is wasted looking through ever-larger archive volumes. If you have a searchable master index, far less time is spent searching for content. This is even more important in legal situations. If corporate counsel is presented with a discovery order asking for specific emails from certain people with particular content, a master index allows those emails (and only those emails) to be found and turned over rapidly -- versus the time and expense of searching every message in the archive.
Consider an email archiving solution that would at least give you the choice of indexing the header information, the message body, the attachment(s), or all of the above. You don't need to use all of those options, but having them available is always recommended.
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