What is Message Archiving & Legal Hold?

Message archiving is the systematic retention of business communications as records: messages captured to an organisation-governed archive, kept for a defined retention schedule, searchable for supervisory review and dispute resolution, and disposed of when the schedule expires. Legal hold is the override: when litigation or investigation is reasonably anticipated, affected records are preserved beyond their normal schedule until the hold is released — deleting them after a hold attaches can constitute spoliation with serious legal consequences. For messaging specifically, the obligations are sector-shaped. Financial-services regulators worldwide require firms to retain and supervise business communications on any channel staff actually use — enforcement against firms whose staff conducted business over personal consumer apps has produced fines in the billions cumulatively, which is why 'channel capture' has become a board-level topic. Government bodies operate under public-records law; healthcare providers under clinical-records regulation; and privacy regimes such as GDPR and PDPL add data-subject rights and minimisation duties that shape how archives must be governed. The design question for an [end-to-end encrypted](/glossary/end-to-end-encryption) platform is where the archive sits and who holds it: the credible enterprise answer is an organisation-held archive — inside the operator's perimeter, governed by its policy, with supervisory access itself audited and archiving policy-visible to staff — rather than either a vendor-accessible backdoor or no archive at all. Retention schedules, review workflows, hold procedures, and export formats are mapped from the operator's actual regulatory framework during scoping, which is how Zeour engineers the archive in each NOVARYX deployment.