US-12626226-B1 - In-place e-mail procurement and archive system

Abstract

Systems and methods described herein involve receiving journal copies of the e-mails directed to the enterprise architecture; retrieving message identifiers (IDs) from the journal copies of the e-mails for managing the journal copy in a full text index; and in response to a request to retrieve one or more of the in-place e-mails from the enterprise architecture associated with a message ID: providing the message ID to the API associated with the enterprise architecture to retrieve one or more processing points used by the enterprise architecture to process a journal copy corresponding to the message ID; and providing the retrieved one or more processing points associated with the requested one or more of the in-place e-mails to the API to retrieve the requested one or more of the in-place e-mails from one or more devices storing the one or more of the in-place e-mails.

Inventors

• Kon Leong

Assignees

• ZL Technologies Inc.

Dates

Publication Date

20260512

Application Date

20250709

Claims (18)

1. 1 . A method for an archive system for managing an archive of e-mails as in-place e-mails in an enterprise architecture and facilitating retrieval of the in-place e-mails, comprising: receiving the journal copies of the e-mails directed to the enterprise architecture; retrieving message identifiers (IDs) from the journal copies of the e-mails for managing the journal copy in a full text index; and in response to a request to retrieve one or more of the in-place e-mails from the enterprise architecture associated with a message ID from the message IDs: providing the message ID to an application programming interface (API) associated with the enterprise architecture to retrieve a plurality of processing points used by the enterprise architecture to process and trace a history from receipt of the journal copy, to generation of the one or more in-place e-mails for corresponding one or more end user recipients, to delivery of the one or more in-place e-mails to the one or more end user recipients; and providing the retrieved plurality of processing points associated with the requested one or more of the in-place e-mails to the API to retrieve the requested one or more of the in-place e-mails from one or more devices locally storing the one or more of the in-place e-mails on behalf of the one or more end users.
2. 2 . The method of claim 1 , wherein the one or more devices comprise one or more user devices that manages the one or more of the in-place e-mails.
3. 3 . The method of claim 1 , further comprising generating the full text index of the journal copies with the message IDs in a database and deleting the journal copies.
4. 4 . The method of claim 1 , wherein the requested one or more of the in-place e-mails comprises blind carbon copy e-mails.
5. 5 . The method of claim 1 , further comprising providing a user interface configured to facilitate search of the e-mails, wherein in response to a search request conducted through the user interface, retrieving ones of the message IDs associated with the search request; wherein the request to retrieve the one or more of the in-place e-mails from the enterprise architecture is made from ones of the retrieved message IDs associated with selections of ones of the e-mails in the user interface.
6. 6 . The method of claim 1 , wherein the user interface is configured to conduct search of the e-mails by text, wherein the text is searched against the full text index of the in-place e-mails managed in a database of the archive system, the full text index of the in-place e-mails associated with corresponding message IDs.
7. 7 . The method of claim 1 , wherein the user interface is configured to search the e-mails by file attachment, wherein the file attachment is searched against a full text index of the in-place e-mails managed in a database of the archive system, the full text index of the in-place e-mails associated with corresponding message IDs.
8. 8 . The method of claim 1 , wherein the journal copies are deleted after generating the full text index and retrieving the message IDs for subsequent use in the request.
9. 9 . The method of claim 6 , wherein the text is one or more of a text in a body of the e-mails, a sender, a direct recipient, a carbon copy recipient, or a blind carbon copy recipient.
10. 10 . An archive system configured to manage an archive of e-mails as in-place e-mails in an enterprise architecture and facilitating retrieval of the in-place e-mails, comprising: a storage system; and a server connected to the storage system by a network, the server comprising: a processor, configured to: receive journal copies of the e-mails directed to the enterprise architecture; retrieve message identifiers (IDs) from the journal copies of the e-mails for management in a full text index managed by the storage system; in response to a request to retrieve one or more of the in-place e-mails from the enterprise architecture associated with a message ID from the message IDs: provide the message ID to an application programming interface (API) associated with the enterprise architecture to retrieve a plurality of processing points used by the enterprise architecture to process and trace a history from receipt of the journal copy, to generation of the one or more in-place e-mails for corresponding one or more end user recipients, to delivery of the one or more in-place e-mails to the one or more end user recipients; and provide the retrieved plurality of processing points associated with the requested one or more of the in-place e-mails to the API to retrieve the requested one or more of the in-place e-mails from one or more devices locally storing the one or more of the in-place e-mails on behalf of the one or more end users.
11. 11 . The archive system of claim 10 , wherein the one or more devices comprise one or more user devices that manages the one or more of the in-place e-mails.
12. 12 . The archive system of claim 10 , wherein the processor is configured to generate the full text index of the journal copies with the message IDs in a database managed by the storage system and delete the journal copies.
13. 13 . The archive system of claim 10 , wherein the requested one or more of the in-place e-mails comprises blind carbon copy e-mails.
14. 14 . The archive system of claim 10 , wherein the processor is further configured to provide a user interface configured to facilitate search of the e-mails, wherein in response to a search request conducted through the user interface the processor is configured to retrieve message IDs associated with the search request; wherein the request to retrieve the one or more of the in-place e-mails from the enterprise architecture is made from ones of the retrieved message IDs associated with selections of ones of the e-mails in the user interface.
15. 15 . The archive system of claim 10 , wherein the user interface is configured to conduct search of the e-mails by text, wherein the text is searched against the full text index of the in-place e-mails managed in a database of the archive system, the full text index of the in-place e-mails associated with corresponding message IDs.
16. 16 . The archive system of claim 10 , wherein the user interface is configured to search the e-mails by file attachment, wherein the file attachment is searched against a full text index of the in-place e-mails managed in a database of the archive system, the full text index of the in-place e-mails associated with corresponding message IDs.
17. 17 . The archive system of claim 10 , wherein the processor is configured to delete the journal copies after the full text index is generated and the message IDs are retrieved for subsequent use in the request.
18. 18 . The archive system of claim 15 , wherein the text is one or more of a text in a body of the e-mails, a sender, a direct recipient, a carbon copy recipient, or a blind carbon copy recipient.

Description

CROSS REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS This U.S. patent application is based on and claims the benefit of domestic priority under 35 U.S.C 119(e) from provisional U.S. patent application No. 63/779,635, filed on Mar. 28, 2025, the disclosure of which is hereby incorporated by reference herein in its entirety. BACKGROUND Field The present disclosure is generally directed to electronic mail archiving systems, and more specifically, to an in-place e-mail procurement and archive system. Related Art Electronic mail (e-mail) communications are commonplace for any business. To facilitate receipt, processing, archiving, and delivery of e-mails, many businesses utilize an enterprise architecture involving a set of solutions, such as a client interface or software for e-mail management and archiving for each user/recipient, servers implementing the backbone of the enterprise solution for e-mails to handle receipt and delivery of e-mails, storage systems to facilitate archiving of e-mails, and other tools or solutions that are attached to or associated with the client interface or software for the user. To comply with business regulations, records management, or information governance such as discovery compliance, the implemented enterprise architecture also needs to archive such e-mails for at least a certain period of time. Such enterprise architectures can utilize an archival system that clones received e-mails and documents and manage them in one or more storage systems. In some instances, such archived e-mails may be used by the business to conduct data analytics using data analytics tools as desired. SUMMARY There are several issues with related art enterprise architectures used to manage e-mails. In a first issue, as a business grows and hires more employees, the amount of e-mail received by the business can grow exponentially. A business having only a few hundred users can receive or send a large volume of e-mail (e.g., billions) over the course of only a few years. The costs to archive such e-mails, even if only for a limited amount of time, can therefore grow exponentially as increased storage becomes required. In another related art issue, enterprise architectures utilized for e-mail management have little to no cross-enterprise compatibility for access or manipulation due issues such as vendor lock-in. Such enterprise architectures can be quite siloed, causing issues with the ability to conduct analytics, or facilitating procurement of e-mails to a third party without utilizing the enterprise architecture of the business. In situations for which e-mails need to be procured quickly for regulatory compliance, the business typically has no choice but to use crawling tools within the enterprise architecture to search and procure the e-mail from the archive. However, as the amount of e-mails managed by the business can be inordinately large (e.g., billions), such tools require a large amount of time and compute to crawl the archive and procure the requested e-mail from archives, or from the storage systems facilitating the user client interfaces or software. To address the issues of the related art, example implementations described herein are directed to an in-place e-mail procurement and archival system. The system in the example implementations take advantage of both the journal copy that is received by the enterprise architecture before processing, as well as information generated at each processing point of the enterprise architecture before delivery to the end user to generate a full text index of all e-mails received by the enterprise architecture implemented by the business to remove the need to clone all e-mails received by each end user, thereby massively reducing storage costs as e-mails sent to the end user can be stored in-place instead of requiring a clone copy. The full text index of the e-mails is also stored with information generated from each processing point of the enterprise architecture that occurs between receipt of the journal copy to the final delivery of the e-mail to the end user, which facilitates the functionality to reconstitute any e-mail from the perspective of the end user, thereby facilitating archiving of e-mails while allowing the business to manage e-mails in-place without requiring a clone copy of each e-mail received by the end user. Such an example implementation also obviates the need to crawl all of the e-mails managed by the enterprise system, therefore reducing the time and compute required to procure e-mails for regulatory compliance. Further, because a full-text index is maintained in the archival system, data analytics can be conducted on the text managed by the archive from cross enterprise solutions, thereby avoiding the need to utilize the same enterprise architecture implemented by the business to conduct analytics, search, or procurement and essentially bypass the enterprise architecture. As the archive is a full-text index, analytics can be conducted signifi