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Electronic mail, often abbreviated as e-mail, email, or eMail, is any method of creating, transmitting, or storing primarily text-based human communications with digital communications systems. Historically, a variety of electronic mail system designs evolved that were often incompatible or not interoperable. With the proliferation of the Internet since the early 1980s, however, the standardization efforts of Internet architects succeeded in promulgating a single standard based on the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), first published as an Internet Standard in 1982.

Modern e-mail systems are based on a store-and-forward model in which e-mail computer server systems, accept, forward, or store messages on behalf of users, who only connect to the e-mail infrastructure with their personal computer or other network-enabled device for the duration of message transmission or retrieval to or from their designated server. Rarely is e-mail transmitted directly from one user's device to another's.

Email, shared calendars and contacts are used to power some of the most crucial business-critical operations. While it was once just a convenient way for employees to communicate internally, today email systems such as Microsoft Exchange are tightly integrated with other important applications and are one of the primary methods for communicating with suppliers and current or prospective customers. As a result, protecting email systems against costly downtime is a matter of huge importance for businesses and IT departments.

A Micrsoft Exchange Server system is actually a complex configuration of multiple databases, used to store and manipulate data along with a message transport system to move email and other information into and out of these databases. Protection of the database files, along with their log files and checkpoint files, is critical to the reliability and recovery of any Exchange server. Only by protecting all of these files can you be sure you can resurrect an Exchange system that has suffered a disaster.

Many businesses still run on disparate email accounts, per user, per machine. As a business owner the management and security of such a setup can be a headache. Matrix IT Solutions can help you plan and implement a move to a centralised email and collaboration solution based on Microsoft Exchange, whilst retaining your email data.