Every day, people send and receive around 319.6 billion emails. By 2025, this figure will reach 376.4 billion with 4.5 billion email users.

What does it mean for businesses?

Companies have to manage heaps of emails and find ways to record all customer communications. They must also secure email communications from possible storage failures and misuse. Without this, businesses risk losing important messages and may fail to provide quality support to customers.

So how to enhance storage management? We recommend backing up and archiving emails in PDF. By converting email messages to PDF, you can store them in a convenient format for quick and easy access.

PDF copies will also simplify regulatory compliance, improve IT productivity, and bring other benefits of archiving emails.

Find out more about why and how to turn an email into a PDF in our article.

Email Archiving vs. Email Backup

From a technical perspective, email archiving and email backup are pretty different. Let’s clarify these differences to help you better understand what type of data storage you need.

Email archiving is for creating cold copies of mailbox data. Its primary purpose is to ensure regulatory compliance and enable a company to implement secure email communication storage. Apart from that, email archiving allows companies to save space. In most cases, teams rarely access archived emails since they don’t need them to perform everyday duties.

Email backup is about copying original data to secure it from damage or deletion. Backups are used for operational purposes and allow a company to quickly run disaster recovery in force majeure cases, like accidentally deleted emails.

Email backups are stored for a shorter period. Once this time passes, the data is archived. For the same reason, data archiving is a regularly scheduled event, whereas backup is a continuous process.

Generally, most businesses adopt both email backup and archiving practices. These procedures aren’t mutually exclusive and play an important role at different stages of email data management.

To run both archiving and backup, you will need to convert HTML emails to PDF. This way, they will be stored in a convenient format and don’t take a lot of space. PDF archived emails are easier to view and use for reference purposes.

Why Do Businesses Need to Secure Email Communications by Turning Them into a PDF File?

Interaction workers spend 28% of their working time checking emails. It’s around 2.6 hours per day. In other words, the way a company handles emails significantly affects the effectiveness of its employees. Last-ditch attempts to reduce the volume of messages don’t help. Optimization and secure email communication archiving are the only suitable approaches.

The benefits of archiving emails and backups allow you to make up for the lost time. You can automate some of the processes and reap other advantages listed below.

#1. Benefits of archiving emails and backup in PDF. More effective teamwork

If you don’t have a data management policy (or it doesn’t work 100%), employees will treat messages in their email accounts differently. Some may delete emails once a customer leaves; others, vice versa, will store messages for ages. This leads to regulatory issues and confusion.

Email to PDF conversion for data archiving enables you to automate storing all the received and delivered messages. As a result, the entitled team members can access the same database whenever they need it and don’t have to keep communications on their hard drive. This makes in-house data storage more coordinated and allows employees to access past communications in a secure, regulated way.

#2. Benefits of archiving emails and backup in PDF. Ensures regulatory compliance and secure email communications

Although regulatory checks and audits don’t happen every day, you must always be ready for them. Compliance is one of the critical benefits of archiving emails.

Automated email storage as PDF files allows you to share the requested data with regulatory bodies upon request. You can quickly retrieve historical data to prove that your business complies with the law. Besides, most PDF converters, including Inkit, encrypt messages they process. Email encryption additionally powers the security measures you have already adopted.

#3. Benefits of archiving emails and backup in PDF. Convenient and searchable

The PDF format is more convenient to use than HTML files. You can quickly check the content of an email and view additional information, like time, subject, etc. Since PDFs are printable, employees can also retrieve a specific email. 

Moreover, if you make PDFs searchable, you will find the necessary message by keyword. This significantly speeds up document management and saves employees a lot of time. They don’t have to browse all email folders to find a single message. Studies show that keyword search is 9% faster than searching by clicking on folders.

#4. Benefits of archiving emails and backup in PDF. Improve business performance

By storing emails are in a secondary location, you enhance email server performance. Email clients work faster, and your employees need less time to manage messages.

In case you run backup and archiving automatically, this additionally frees your support and IT teams. They don’t need to worry about backing up messages and can focus on other routines, like customer support.

Along with the listed benefits of archiving emails and backup, PDF conversion eliminates mailbox quotas and reduces storage requirements. These are valid reasons to learn how to turn an email into a PDF.

How to Turn an Email into a PDF for Archiving: Manual vs. Automated Approach

There are two main ways to convert HTML email data to PDF: manual and automated.

If you need to archive several emails or would prefer to avoid batch automated rendering, choose manual conversion. In all email clients, such as Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express, Mozilla Thunderbird, and others, you can open the email you need to convert and generate a PDF. Just keep in mind that such manual conversion will take a lot of time.

Find detailed instructions on how to turn an email into a PDF.

If you want to convert, archive, and backup emails automatically, pick automated rendering and email archiving solutions. The software will render emails to PDF and save them in the secondary storage based on time or event triggers. Since everything happens automatically, storage management efforts are minimal.

Automated rendering and archiving solutions work best for most businesses. Since companies usually handle thousands of emails, manual backup is too laborious and insecure. If you get tons of messages daily, it’s better to integrate PDF rendering and archiving systems with your database.

Inkit for Email to PDF Rendering

Inkit is a reach enablement platform that automates a range of routine business processes, with document rendering being one of them.

With Inkit’s Render tool, you can implement HTML to PDF conversion functionality on top of your current system. After a quick integration, Inkit will automatically generate PDF documents based on HTML and securely store them.

Render significantly optimizes your IT department’s work: no need to develop a rendering solution from scratch. Moreover, Inkit flawlessly integrates with many third-party email clients, analytics tools, and other services. Thanks to such multi-functionality, you can use it as an integration platform for cross-channel marketing, customer research, or support.

Want to test Inkit’s capabilities to render secure email communications? Contact us to get a demo.