Costs are something all organizations are conscientious of, and while you can’t put a price on public safety, even regulatory authorities need to keep spending under control. One of the measures that regulatory authorities can take to control their costs is to keep their online memory requirements to a minimum.
However, one of the realities of being a regulatory body is that you necessarily need to keep track of a lot of information to keep accurate records, and one of the most memory intensive modules in the latest version Alinity is Correspondence. When you’re sending out thousands or even tens of thousands of renewal notices, general meeting invitations and council election or bylaw change notifications, the number of email records you start accruing can really add up quickly.
But just knowing how intense correspondence memory requirements are doesn’t help. You also need a way to control how much space is getting eaten up by those email records. That’s why Alinity has introduced an email removal function that can help control the amount of storage space you need, and thus your online storage costs.
Archiving and Trimming Emails
To understand how the email removal function works, it’s important to understand some key concepts about emailing with Alinity’s Correspondence module.
There are three main components to Alinity emails: The audit record, the template, and the personalized content.
The audit record contains all the vital information about the email, including the recipient address, the time it was sent, and the open status, among many other things.
The template of the email is the basic message without any of the personalized content. You can tell you’re viewing a template because the merge fields will contain their placeholder labels, such as FirstName or LastName and so on.
The final piece of an Alinity email is the Personalized content. This contains the actual pdf version of the email, with all those merge fields filled in. It also requires the most storage space, and by far. It’s this personalized portion of the email that Alinity’s archive and trimming feature clips, so that you still have the template and complete audit trail for your records.
The first step is to archive the personalized email content. Just login with an Administrator account and head to the Email tab in the side navigation bar. Then, from the main email screen, select the Sent view to see emails you’ve sent in the past.
Use the All query and select the appropriate date range to target your oldest emails first, or use any of the other queries and search functions to get at the personalized email message content you want to archive and trim. Select the emails either by using the master checkbox if you want to get all of them, or by selecting individual emails. Once you’ve targeted the emails you want, select the Archive action from the dropdown action menu.
Confirm that you want to archive the personalized message content, and then let the process run. Depending on how many emails you archive, archiving could take some time.
If you want to keep the personalized content in external storage for some reason, click the export button to download a zipped file. That way you’ll still have all the pdfs of the emails. Remember that backup history is not indefinite, so if you do need to keep those pdfs, we recommend exporting them.
Now return to the email screen and change your view to Archive.
Again, use the appropriate queries or searches to find the archived personalized message content you want, then select them.
Now choose purge from the dropdown list.
Confirm the action to trim the personalized message content and free up all that disk space. Again, depending on how many emails you’re purging this could take some time.
Once the job is complete, you’ll still see a list of emails in the Purged tab of the email screen, but none of the pdfs will be there. You will still see the message text and all the important recipient data as well, including when the message was both sent to and opened by the recipient.
Archiving and trimming large volumes of old email personalized content is a great way of managing your disk space usage and helping to keep online data storage costs to a minimum while still maintaining a complete record of all the important data regarding each mailing.
For more information about Alinity’s email archive and trimming features, contact us for a free demonstration.
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