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Importing Historical Emails
Importing Historical Emails

Instructions for importing bulk emails

Updated over 10 months ago

Emails are generally journaled to MCO eComms for archival and surveillance purposes. However, at times it is necessary to import historical sets of messages when moving from a prior archiving service.

Importing bulk historical emails is done by providing MCO with the files in a supported format. Care should be taken to ensure user mapping is configured prior to importing emails to ensure they have the correct retention policies applied.

Bulk Email Formats

MCO can process either EML or PST files as part of standard historical email importing. These files are generally transferred in compressed, password protected, zip files over SFTP.

Filename Requirements

Due to limitations in the underlying file system technology used for handling batch processing some special characters are not permitted in the filenames of EML files. Be sure to change or remove these special characters before supplying them to MCO or processing may be delayed.

The following characters are valid:

Alphanumeric characters

  • 0-9

  • a-z

  • A-Z

Special characters

  • Exclamation point (!)

  • Hyphen (-)

  • Underscore (_)

  • Period (.)

  • Asterisk (*)

  • Single quote (')

  • Open parenthesis (()

  • Close parenthesis ())

Special characters to Avoid:

  • Ampersand ("&")

  • Dollar ("$")

  • ASCII character ranges 00–1F hex (0–31 decimal) and 7F (127 decimal)

  • 'At' symbol ("@")

  • Equals ("=")

  • Semicolon (";")

  • Forward slash ("/")

  • Colon (":")

  • Plus ("+")

  • Space – Significant sequences of spaces might be lost in some uses (especially multiple spaces)

  • Comma (",")

  • Question mark ("?")

  • Backslash ("\")

  • Left curly brace ("{")

  • Non-printable ASCII characters (128–255 decimal characters)

  • Caret ("^")

  • Right curly brace ("}")

  • Percent character ("%")

  • Grave accent / back tick ("`")

  • Right square bracket ("]")

  • Quotation marks

  • 'Greater Than' symbol (">")

  • Left square bracket ("[")

  • Tilde ("~")

  • 'Less Than' symbol ("<")

  • 'Pound' character ("#")

  • Vertical bar / pipe ("|")

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