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By Mark Mandel, RM Practice Manager at Open Text Corporation
June 08, 2010 - 11:15 AM
One of the essential ingredients of a Records and Information Management program is email management. There is a tension between the competing polarities related to email management: IT, on one hand, wants to delete emails quickly to keep the enterprise email system operating at full efficiency, optimizing storage space; Records Management, on the other hand, wants to treat email like any other record, with retention rules that administer how long each email is retained.
The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure tend to favor the Records Management view. Basically, any information stored electronically is discoverable in a court case. Early deletion of emails pertaining to a court case can result in sanctions and penalties.
There is a pervasive fallacy that continues today, which says delete emails quickly (for example, after six months) to limit an organization's liability. This approach is definitely NOT recommended. It flies in the face of standard Records Management principles and ignores the fact that emails are often very pertinent to an organization's business, just as any other documents are.
For example, emails about the award of a contract, discussing some details about the award, development of the award particulars, notification of final award - all belong in a contract file, which is governed by very specific retention rules. The fact that it is an email rather than a document makes no difference. In fact, early deletion can be construed by the courts as an attempt to hide evidence should that contract ever be the subject of litigation.
The practical implementation of an email management Records Management program can be challenging. It includes classification of each email to determine which "bucket" it belongs in, which is sometimes difficult. There are two basic approaches: user driven classification and auto classification.
In the user driven paradigm, each user is required to classify each email. This can be done by tagging the email or by dragging and dropping the email into a classification location.
In the auto classification paradigm, classification software is used to tag each email, using "From," "To," "Subject," "Date," and email content.
There are advantages and disadvantages to each approach, and the solution that is best for your organization involves corporate culture, complexity of the content, and management authority. User based classification is based on consistent user participation. It can be very accurate if participation is high. However, in a large organization this is difficult to achieve.
Auto classification is based on software and software training tools. Accuracy is based on how good the classification engine is, combined with the complexity of your retention schedule. A less complex retention schedule can achieve better results. Since it is not based on user participation, it is transparent to the end user.
Personally, I prefer the latter approach. A solution that is transparent to the end user, I think, is far superior as long as the technology can classify at least 80% of the emails correctly. Using role based retention can also help - saving emails based on who sent or received them, especially executives, can raise the accuracy of auto classification.
In order to keep the IT folks happy, often the best approach is to use an email archive product. This type of product makes a real-time copy of all emails onto another archive server. Retention rules are applied to the archive, not the production system. The production system applies standard approaches to limiting mailbox size, and this does not affect the archive. This approach helps both sides - IT and RM serve its constituency in a complementary manner.
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