Overview

Message archival is the process of storing any communication sent to customers for later access. Retaining these customer messages is important for multiple reasons, including:

• Regulatory compliance: Various regulatory bodies globally, depending on the region and/or industry (especially in the BFSI sector), mandate businesses to store any "electronic communication" with the customer. While certain rules recommend storing customer communications, others necessitate businesses to do so. In a few cases, the retention rules also describe the type of communication that should be retained, for instance, either storing all messages (including promotional ones) or storing at least transactional messages for a defined period.
  Some rules and guidelines by the respective regions are as follows:
  

  Country or Region	Rule or Guideline
  US	FINRA Rule 2210
  	SEC Rule 17a-4
  	GLBA Rule for Financial Information Privacy
  	FRCP Rule 26
  Canada	IDA 29.7
  EU	MiFID II
  UK	Durable Medium
  India	Digital Lending Guidelines

  The retention period varies for each rule: for instance, SEC Rule 17a-4 has a default six-year retention period whereas GLBA rule for Financial Information Privacy has a default retention of seven years.
• Customer experience: Your customers may be contacting your support touch-points, enquiring about a message they have received. To serve these customers better, you need to empower your teams with information on all transactional and/or promotional messages sent to customers. Your customer service teams can then respond to a customer query and/or complaint by reviewing the personalized message sent to the customer.

  Combining this with the message sent/delivery events (using MoEngage S3 Exports or Streams) can give your teams a 360-degree view of messages received or those that remained undelivered because of various reasons such as the Email box being full or mobile number being unavailable and so on. This 360-degree view of communication sent by you (brand) to your customers helps customer service teams get a holistic context, thereby reducing the turnaround time (TAT) and the cost to serve and, more importantly, improving the overall customer experience.

• Audit: Message archival is a powerful tool for reviewing the content sent to customers. If ever there is a case where a customer complains or disputes a message they received, you can use these archived files to identify the relevance of the claim. 

Recommendation: Retain a copy of the customer messages for at least two to six months, if not more, for the aforementioned reasons.

Message Archival in MoEngage

MoEngage offers the Message Archival feature where businesses can choose to keep a copy of actual notification content sent to customers. This feature helps you stay compliant with regulations, solves your audit needs, and enables you to cater to your customers better. The feature is available for the Email, SMS, and Push channels.

Other benefits of this feature include:

• Indefinite storage: You can choose to store these messages in MoEngage for a month or as long as you need.
• Automated archival: Once the feature is enabled, it would automatically archive customer messages across all vendors/platforms for the specified channels.
• Secure storage: MoEngage ensures the message files are kept in a safe manner, including keeping the messages encrypted.
• UI-based access: Each message can be accessed for a user and event on the MoEngage dashboard.
• Option to download each file: Easily download the message files to keep a local copy.
• Fetch message files (optional): MoEngage allows you to pull these messages to your file store. All the files have a unique identifier to ensure the files can be traced back to the campaign/alert.

View a Message Copy on the Dashboard

You can view the copy of an archived message (Email or SMS ) sent to the customer on the MoEngage dashboard. To do so:

• Go to the Activity Info tab in the User Profile of the customer for whom you wish to look up the communication sent.
• Under User Activity > Events, you will find the list of events associated with the user.
• Message copies are available under the Email Sent, SMS Sent, Notification Received Android, Notification Sent iOS, and Notification Received Web events.

Store Your Files

You have the following options to store your files:

• Store them in MoEngage S3 bucket
• Store them in your S3 bucket

Storing your files in the MoEngage S3 bucket can be beneficial if you want to view the archived files on the MoEngage UI. If you store the files only in your own S3 bucket, MoEngage will need Read Access to display those archived files on the UI.

If you want to store these files with the MoEngage S3 bucket, then MoEngage will create a bucket for you and store your messages securely. 

Storing files in your S3 Bucket:

1. Share the name of the S3 bucket where you want to store your data and provide the read and write access to MoEngage.
2. You also need to provide the ARN URL for your bucket. For more information, refer to Set Up the ARN URL.
3. MoEngage requires the folder name for storing your files.
4. MoEngage requires the name of a different file path if you want to change from the default file path.

For information on:

• File path and naming convention, refer to File Path and Naming Convention.
• File contents, refer to File Contents.

Set Up the ARN URL

Even if you have an S3 bucket already, we still recommend creating a new bucket specifically for MoEngage so you can limit permissions.

1. To create a bucket for your app, open the S3 console and follow the instructions to Sign in or Create an Account with AWS.
2. After you sign in, select S3 from the Storage & Content Delivery category.
3. Select Create Bucket on the next screen and you will be prompted to create your bucket and select a region.
4. Navigate to the Policies tab in the navigation bar and select Get Started then Create Policy. This will allow you to add permissions for your user.
5. Select Create Your Own Policy. This will give limited permissions so we only can access the bucket that you specify.
6. When creating your own policy, specify a Policy Name of your choice and enter the following code into the Policy Document section. Be sure to replace the INSERTSID with your SID, INSERTPOLICYID with your policy ID, and INSERTBUCKETNAME with your bucket name.
   
   
   DC-01, DC-02, DC-03, and DC-04 DC-05 and DC-06

   {
       "Statement": [
           {
               "Effect": "Allow",
               "Principal": {
                   "AWS": [
                       "arn:aws:iam::612427630422:role/S3-EC2-InstanceRole",
                       "arn:aws:iam::612427630422:role/campaigns_archival_s3_export-role-e1qw8ulf"
                   ]
               },
               "Action": [
                   "s3:GetObject",
                   "s3:PutObject",
                   "s3:ListBucket",
                   "s3:GetLifecycleConfiguration"
               ],
               "Resource": [
                   "arn:aws:s3:::",   ### client bucket arn
                   "arn:aws:s3:::".   ### client bucket arn
               ]
           }
       ]
   }

   {
       "Statement": [
           {
               "Effect": "Allow",
               "Principal": {
                   "AWS": [
                       "arn:aws:iam::163129101105:role/S3-EC2-InstanceRole",
                       "arn:aws:iam::163129101105:role/campaigns_archival_s3_export-role-e1qw8ulf"
                   ]
               },
               "Action": [
                   "s3:GetObject",
                   "s3:PutObject",
                   "s3:ListBucket",
                   "s3:GetLifecycleConfiguration"
               ],
               "Resource": [
                   "arn:aws:s3:::",   ### client bucket arn
                   "arn:aws:s3:::".   ### client bucket arn
               ]
           }
       ]
   }

Frequently Asked Questions