In an operational archiving deployment, messages are archived from the message store instead of the MTA. The figure below shows an architectural view of an operational archiving system.
The diagram above shows that the imexpire command specifies the messages to be archived. Messages can be specified by age, size, message count, and so on (see To Set the Automatic Message Removal (Expire and Purge) Feature in Sun Java System Messaging Server 6.3 Administration Guide). These messages are copied to the staging folder where they are archived into the Sun Compliance and Content Management Solution. The AXS-One application sends an archive confirmation message to the archive report directory indicating messages that have been successfully archived. It also provides information from which URL stubs can be constructed. imarchive does the following:
It marks messages in the messages store as archived and the message remains in both the message store and archive system. Marking it prevents the message from being re-archived.
(Optional) It saves the stub of the message and deletes the RFC 822 Message.