Salesforce is the backbone of customer engagement for thousands of businesses, but there’s a hidden storage problem most admins and IT teams run into: emails and attachments eating up valuable storage. Did you know that EmailMessage records and their attachments can take up more than 70% of your Salesforce storage over time?
This doesn’t just push up your storage costs — it slows down reporting, affects user productivity, and creates compliance challenges. The smart solution? Archiving Salesforce emails. In this blog, we’ll explore why archiving matters, best practices, and how solutions like DataArchiva make it seamless.
Why Salesforce Email Archiving Matters
Salesforce uses EmailMessage objects (and Task objects for legacy orgs) to log customer emails. These quickly accumulate, especially in high-volume industries like financial services, healthcare, insurance, and retail.
While Salesforce Sales Cloud and Service Cloud store operational emails inside EmailMessage objects, Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) generates a massive volume of marketing campaign emails, newsletters, and engagement logs. These can also bloat storage and slow down analytics.
Some common challenges include:
- High Storage Costs: Extra Salesforce storage is expensive.
- Slow Performance: Large volumes of old emails slow down reports and queries.
- Compliance Burden: Regulated industries (HIPAA, FINRA, GDPR) require retaining emails for years.
- Cluttered User Experience: Too many irrelevant email records make finding current data difficult.
Without an archiving strategy, Salesforce users face growing costs, compliance risks, and reduced efficiency.
But specifically, why is email archiving essential in the Salesforce Marketing Cloud?
- Campaign history grows fast: millions of outbound and inbound email records.
- Storage costs skyrocket with unused historical campaign data.
- Performance issues affect segmentation and audience building.
- Compliance: regulated industries must retain marketing communication records.
DataArchiva Moves Old Email Records from Salesforce to Cost-Effective Long-Term Storage Solutions with 100% Access
How Archiving Emails in Salesforce Improves Org Efficiency?
We are aware that, as CIOs, IT Directors, or Salesforce Admin Heads, you must have already heard of saving Salesforce space by offloading emails externally, but that’s not all you want. A strategic and business-driven value is what connects archiving emails to productivity, compliance, customer experience, and cost optimization.
Here’s how you can achieve it:
Reduces Storage Overhead & Cost Burden
Archived emails are offloaded from expensive Salesforce storage to external, low-cost platforms like AWS, Azure, or on-prem servers. This frees up Salesforce space for mission-critical data and significantly lowers recurring storage costs.
Keeps Salesforce Running Faster
Overloaded orgs suffer from slow searches, delayed queries, and longer load times. Archiving removes old, inactive emails, keeping the CRM lightweight and optimized for active users, improving system speed and employee productivity.
Ensures Regulatory & Compliance Readiness
Enhances User Experience in Salesforce
Strengthens Customer Trust with Reliable Records
Archived emails act as a single source of truth for customer communication history. During disputes or service escalations, teams can quickly retrieve older emails, leading to faster resolutions and improved customer satisfaction.
Frees IT Teams from Manual Data Management
Without archiving, IT teams spend hours managing storage, exporting emails, or firefighting performance issues. With automated archiving, admins can focus on strategic projects instead of manual cleanup.
Improves Collaboration Across Teams
Archived emails remain searchable and accessible across Salesforce, meaning sales, legal, and compliance teams can collaborate seamlessly without duplicating records or exporting data outside the system.
Builds a Future-Proof Data Strategy
As email volumes grow exponentially, businesses risk Salesforce becoming a storage dump. Archiving creates a scalable, long-term data management strategy, ensuring Salesforce remains performance-ready for future growth.
Lowers Risk of Data Loss or Accidental Deletion
Native deletion or mismanagement of email records can lead to permanent loss. Archiving ensures every email is securely stored, backed up, and retrievable, minimizing business risks tied to lost communication.
A Japanese Firm Bulk-Archived Legacy Data with 250 GB of Emails and Attachments
Ways to Archive Historical Emails in Salesforce
Instead of deleting old data, businesses should implement file and email message archiving together. This ensures:
- Sensitive content is retained securely.
- The email record context is preserved.
- Email storage costs are minimized.
- Searchability is maintained via indexed or OCR-processed formats.
DataArchiva: Purpose-Built for Salesforce Email Archiving
Two Deployment Models:
- Native Archiving (Big Objects): Fully within Salesforce, ideal for staying on-platform.
- External Archiving: Uses AWS, Azure, Heroku, or on-prem for storage outside Salesforce, offering full control.
Enterprise‑Grade Salesforce Data Archiving with DataArchiva
Key Features
- Scheduled email archiving jobs for ongoing optimization.
- Advanced encryption (AES 256) to protect archived data.
- Policy-based archiving of old emails with automated retention workflows.
- Preserves object relationships and data hierarchies.
- Bulk archival of gigabytes of old emails without affecting performance.
- Full restoration support for anytime data access.
But that’s not all! If you wish to integrate AI and smart archiving into your Salesforce workflow for emails, we have an amazing solution for you: XfilesPro’s OCR.
OCR-Enabled Archiving as a Feature
Modern tools like XfilesPro offer OCR-enhanced features like Xtract, making email archiving storage smarter and more accessible.
OCR Benefits:
- Automated Data Extraction from scanned/email attachments.
- Improved Accuracy using AI to detect and validate content.
- Seamless Integration with Salesforce objects and workflows.
- Faster Decisions with indexed, searchable archives that speed up case and contract handling.
Best Practices for Salesforce Email Archiving
- Archive old campaign sends and engagement logs.
- Use tiered storage for different campaigns (e.g., keep the last 1 year active, archive older).
- Apply data retention policies aligned with compliance needs.
- Ensure archived data is searchable and retrievable for audits or marketing performance reviews.
- Identify which EmailMessage records are old, unused, or compliance-only.
- Active (needed daily), Semi-active (rarely used), and Inactive (archive-ready).
- Move inactive emails and attachments to cost-effective storage (Big Objects or external storage).
- Schedule policies to run automatically, reducing manual workload.
- Use OCR-powered search for attachments and archived content.
- Ensure archived emails remain linked to Opportunities, Cases, Accounts, etc.
Conclusion
As email communications expand rapidly, relying solely on Salesforce’s native storage capacity can cause performance issues, downtime, and high storage costs.
With purpose-built tools like DataArchiva, organizations can take full control of their Salesforce archive email messages strategy, while OCR tools like Xtract enhance accessibility and intelligence in managing unstructured data.
Whether you’re archiving emails, handling Salesforce Marketing Cloud operations, or working toward compliance with marketing cloud email archiving, now’s the time to make email archiving storage a strategic priority.
Implement a Powerful Data Archive Strategy for Salesforce Without Compromising Data Security
Trying humane approach to marketing without leaving the algorithm behind
