How To Archive Email
For many employees, using email is really only about two things: sending and receiving. But for enterprises as a whole, email is their lifeblood. It is essential to find a way to leverage and manage the data within emails so it can be easily searched and used. There are legal requirements, too, which must be met.According to Dean Richardson, vice president of sales with ArcMail Technology, businesses should archive all email. “You never know which email you will need down the road,” he notes. Companies have saved thousands of dollars by finding just one email.
“Emails should be archived in real time, as this provides a backup of all emails should the user suffer a catastrophic mail server crash and find themselves unable to restore some or all of their email,” Richardson says.
The Ins & Outs Of Archiving Archiving all of a company’s email in a central archive with fast search/retrieve and export capabilities allows a company to respond to discovery requests solely from its archive, saving the cost and inconvenience of desktop discovery and discovery from mail server backups, which are very time-consuming. And it’s more than just email.
“The size of the company will have a strong bearing on what type of solution should be implemented. SMEs are typically companies with up to 1,000 seats, operating a Microsoft Windows environment possibly with MS Exchange server or running third-party software on the gateway. Thus, the IT administrator needs to identify a solution that can be installed on both exchange and gateway platforms and one that integrates with the company’s existing IT infrastructure such as Active Directory and SQL Server,”.
Examine questions such as: Will the company increase the number of mailboxes in the medium to long term? Must the company meet compliance requirements? Will it need to leverage SQL as an archiving store (or use NTFS on a separate server)? Can the solution carry out forensic auditing? Does it allow email retrieval on demand?
“SMEs are often cash-strapped with little or no IT budgets. Such limitations impact the email archiving strategy deployed. You need a solution that offers price-performance without affecting functionality. The solution must be user-friendly for both the IT administrator and the employee who needs to use it,” Kelleher says.
“A key trend is the need to archive other ‘unstructured’ data types. Examples are IM, voicemail, office files, etc.,” notes Bob Spurzem, director of product marketing at Mimosa Systems. That is because all electronic data that office workers manage on a daily basis are a target for litigation and are largely unmanaged by organizations.
Many SMEs realize the value of email archiving as a productivity tool and as a means to move older email from their overloaded mail servers to a repository that is designed to store huge amounts of email and allow very quick search and access to that email.
Richardson sees SMEs opting for email archiving, not for particular compliance reasons but because their users want unlimited email storage without mailbox restrictions, and they want to be able to search their email quickly and find what they are looking for. With ArcMail’s Defender, Richardson says, results are available in one to two seconds.
A good email archival solution should search, open, and recover an archived message within a couple of minutes, Spurzem says. “Admins can perform this task, or better yet, users should be able to do it themselves,” he says. Kelleher agrees that the maximum recovery time should be minutes.
Time To Storage Simply put, there are two schools of thought on archiving: keep everything and delete everything. “The tide is shifting towards ‘keep everything,’” Richardson says. “When you delete your copy of an email, there is always at least one other copy out there, and often it is not within your control. Do you want to be the only one in court without a copy of your own email?”
“Every email has a sender and at least one recipient. We have seen cases where companies had set destructive retention policies, and particular emails were used against them in court,” Richardson says. These emails were kept by employees despite the destructive retention policy. Had the company archived all their email and had access to all the related emails (not just the ones that the plaintiff chose to keep), the outcome would have likely been different, he says.
Retention should be managed according to policy. “The shipping dock employee is treated differently than the president,” Spurzem notes. “Email should be archived as soon as possible to ensure a copy is in the archive before it is deleted by an employee. Then the email archive manages each user mailbox according to its retention policy.”
Kelleher says a big advantage of archiving is that it reduces the size of end users’ mailboxes and, hence, the number of requests for more storage. “Since many employees may be reluctant to empty their mailbox and use the archives, an IT administrator may want to impose a 30- or 90-day storage limit,” he adds.
There is no specific time that emails should be kept on a server before being offloaded to long-term archiving. “There is a different answer for everyone,” Richardson says. “The drivers are regulatory, user preference, and best business practices.”
Every SME has users who keep stuff forever. Richardson says an employee’s email queue definitely should not be deleted. Spurzem says users should be allowed to keep email, according to their business needs, for as long as they need. “The archive is a repository of email that is managed for the organization’s needs, while the personal mailbox of each user is managed by the user, according to his or her needs,” he explains. “The archive should not dictate users’ behavior with regards to email.”
Most analysts recommend seven years as the lowest common denominator for keeping emails. “However, some companies choose to keep them longer if it is advantageous to do so,” Richardson says. “Best case, you find the email that wins your case or that you can use to remind the other party of the conversation/transaction. Worst case, there is a damaging email that may hurt you.”
In the worst case, deleting your copy of the email is rarely a solution because the opposing party will already have a copy of any damaging emails. “They rarely seem to have copies of emails that help your case,” he notes. If you have every email, you can quickly determine where you stand and often find other emails that can put a damaging email in context or even prove your case, Richardson adds.
| The Legal Angle Both the federal government and some states have laws regulating email. The two key federal laws are the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 and SEC (U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission) Rule 17a-4. At the state level, there are various important laws regarding freedom of information, privacy, and notification that impact email, Mimosa Systems’ (www.mimosasystems.com) Bob Spurzem says. Both Spurzem and ArcMail Technology’s (www.arcmailtech.com) Dean Richardson say the most important new law on archiving data is the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure’s new amendments. Known as FRCP, it sets out federal guidelines. More information can be found on the Mimosa Web site at www.mimosasystems.com/html/ediscovery_frcp.htm. Archiving will reduce potential legal risk, penalties, and fines, Spurzem says. An archive is a record of all email and attachments. Legally, FRCP requires the data is protected and stored in its original format, that it is accessible for legal discovery, and that it is retained according to company email policy. Should litigation begin, all email records for the users involved should be retained, and all retention policies should be suspended so no disposition occurs while the case is active—that is, there is no destruction of evidence. |
The Privacy Angle
Who owns the right to review and evaluate email left in a worker’s mailbox? What about personal messages from Saturday night’s hot date . . . or private, but derogatory or off-color, messages left by colleagues.
“This is a very hot debate,” says GFI Software’s (www.gfi.com) David Kelleher. Some companies argue that any email sent using the company network becomes its property, and therefore management has a right to check employees’ mailboxes. On the other hand, privacy rights groups argue that checking an employee’s email breaches his rights.
Employees might have the notion that once they delete an email, it is gone forever, but that’s not the case. They often don’t think of the ramifications of using email to send off-color jokes or other content that may be problematic from a company liability point of view.
"Once an archive is introduced (as a productivity tool, not a Big Brother tool), employees realize that their email is permanent, and they adjust their behavior accordingly (Do I really want to send that email, knowing it will be archived?), which reduces company liability,” Dean Richardson of ArcMail Technology (www.arcmailtech.com) says.
“At the end of the day, it is a question of trust,” Kelleher says. If there is a possibility that an employee is no longer loyal to the company or that he is abusing the system or sending out sensitive material to third parties, then management should have the right to check and verify if any wrongdoing has been committed, he says.
“Every state, every country has its own rules and regulations regarding email archiving and email use. . . . And they are not limited to federal regulations,” Kelleher says. Be aware of all of the regulations before setting policy or acting against a worker.
posted by cathal @ 22:20
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