Managed security services firm MessageLabs has launched a new version of its archiving service designed to cover firms' compliance, legal discovery and storage management needs.

The MessageLabs Archiving Service deals with all external and internal email and allows speedy, on-demand access to messages once archived, according to the firm.

The service includes new attachment stubbing technology, which can reduce the amount of Exchange storage needed by replacing attachments in users' inboxes with a link to the same document stored in the archive, explained the firm's archiving product manager, David Kwan.

"By reducing the mailbox size for all users, IT ends up working with smaller storage information stores overall," Kwan said. "This in turn leads to faster, regular backups and faster recovery when data needs to be uploaded."

Adminstrators can also set up automated policies to create attachment stubs based on mailbox size, age of attachment, file type of attachment and other criteria, Kwan added.

Chris Reid of IT consultancy Morse argued that email archiving is becoming increasingly high on IT directors' list of priorities, although he added that with many current systems, the process of locating and restoring archived emails can be "painstakingly laborious".

"Businesses are under increasing pressure from compliance regulations to store all business correspondence for longer periods of time, which means storage needs are increasing exponentially," Reid said.