Best Practices for Email Management

According to the Radacati Group, business users in 2007 received an average of 18 megabytes (MB) of email per day – and that figure is predicted to reach 28 MB per day by 2011. Now let’s take a look at the broader implications. If you take that 2007 figure – 18 MB per day – and multiply it by 260 business days, you end up with a figure of 4.6 gigabytes (GB) of email per user per year!

But it gets worse. Call it “The Tyranny of Math.” If your organization has 1,000 employees, this figure rises to 4.6 terabytes of email per year. Radacati also found that users sent and received an average of 133 emails per day. Again, at 260 business days per year, this equates to roughly 35,000 messages per user – all of which you’ll have to search through in legal discovery, without proper email management.

Clearly, email is not trivial – or inexpensive. On the contrary, it is a vital business function involving vital business documents that must be addressed in a strategic, professional manner just as you would any other essential business practice.

Defining “Email Management”
Email management begins with the identification of businessrelevant emails and a policy for the classification, storage and destruction of these emails in accordance to, and consistent with, your business standards.

According to a recent AIIM survey titled “Email Management – An Oxymoron" (find at www.aiim.org/email ), 76 percent of respondents had not yet begun or were in the beginning stages of addressing email management. When asked about email archival, 44 percent indicated they rely on their backups, 18 percent said they don’t do anything, and 15 percent use personal archives to store it (utilizing the Personal Folders Files feature for Microsoft Outlook and the Notes Storage Facility feature for Lotus Notes).

While these numbers may seem large, there is evidence that governance is taking place and becoming a focus. Forty-four percent of respondents said they have an email retention policy and 47 percent apply retention management practices to email based on content. Seventy-two percent said they want an email archival solution that is tied to their Records Management (RM) or Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system.

Establish guiding principles
A good place to start is the formation of a series of guiding principles for the enterprise. These do not need to be complex and can begin in a simple way. For example:

• Email belongs to the organization, not the individual
• Email is a business tool
• Email should be used appropriately
• Email must be managed according to content and value to the organization
• Email should be stored appropriately
• Email is not a records series unto itself
• Users must be trained on expectations
• Different users may be treated differently according to roles and requirements
• Email policies have to be followed and enforced
• Enforcement must be applied equally

This is just a simple example of some guiding principles that might be used as a starting point. In some cases, however, there are exceptions. In the United States, for instance, emails housed on business servers – regardless of the fact they might be of a personal nature, are considered property of the business and are subject to review by business owners. But in some countries, like those in Europe, personal emails – even though they reside on the business server and policy says that email is for business use only – are still considered personal and the business owner has no right to review them.

Reduce email glut
How often do you use email as a collaboration tool, sending an email to a colleague with a document attached? With, for instance, a message that says “Please review the attached spreadsheet and confirm the budget numbers for Q1.” And how often do you send such a message with an attachment like this not only to one person, but to several more people at the same time via the “cc” function? Many office workers do precisely that not only once, but dozens of times a day. And, as emails from all sides proliferate, it becomes increasingly difficult to even know what the correct, latest version of the document is.

A much better way to handle this and reduce email glut is to eliminate the attachments and use a link to the location in a repository where it’s stored. In addition, using ECM with version control, you can track the changes made and create an audit record of who made each one. If you’re dealing with an outside entity, you can still use the link method in conjunction with Web access to the repository or an FTP site where copies of the files can be held for retrieval.

Decide what to hold
Personal messages, drafts, messages to schedule meetings, and an announcement about the corporate picnic are all examples of emails that are not critical business information that needs to be retained permanently or even beyond the date of the event. You may want to hold on to them temporarily but there is likely no business value to this content.

Identify what really needs to be kept and who should capture it. When email is used as a tool in contract negotiations, to deliver invoices or as a receipt for transactions, you’ll want to capture it as a business record and manage it under the records retention guidelines. Remember, email is not a record series but the content within the email should be treated as such and classified appropriately.

There may also be regulatory guidelines provided by the government or industry that dictate how the email content should be managed and retained, though not referenced as email but as content type. In some cases you may want to use a graphic that maps out the decision process.

Identify roles and responsibilities
If you’re a business leader or manager, it’s up to you to know what you must capture and how you must manage it over its lifecycle. It’s also up to you to put policies in place and train users on what their role is in the process of capturing email. You may want to start with a simple, guiding principle for capture like this:

• Internal messages - the sender retains
• External messages received by a user – the user retains
• External messages received by multiple users – user who has to act on the message retains/one user is designated to retain 
• Shared inboxes – the shared account is used to retain/one user is designated to retain

Automate when possible
One of the best ways to help manage email is by incorporating tools that will capture and index them automatically, eliminating the need for human interaction as much as possible. Email archiving systems do the following:

• Enable centralized message capture and management
• May provide single-instance storage of messages May provide tamper-proof storage of messages and/or the archive
• May compress messages
• In addition, you can include content filtering capabilities to limit or control incoming and outgoing email based on subject, who it is addressed to or from, etc. to ensure information of a sensitive nature is not leaving your organization without proper authorization.

Work with a cross-functional team at your organization
Email management is vital to any enterprise, and you’ve got to do your homework to find the right approach for your organization. What’s common-place in one state or country might actually be illegal in another. That’s why it’s important to work with a cross-functional program team of IT, business management, users, legal and other entities to help you identify requirements and provide insights you might otherwise never consider. That alone can save a lot of time and effort as you institute best practices for email management.

Bob Larrivee is an AIIM director, industry advisor, trainer, and contributing editor for Infonomics^® magazine.

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Try a Module from AIIM's Email Management Certificate Program for Free!

Here is an opportunity to take one of the modules from the Email Management (EMM) Practitioner Certificate Program for free. The module, Email Management Technologies, a $75 value, is available at www.aiim.org/freetraining. To begin, select the Email Management image and use the campaign code EMP8A9. Below is a brief description of the various Email Management (EMM) training programs offered by AIIM. The EMM Certificate Program consists of a Strategy track, a Practitioner track, a Specialist track, and a Master track. The EMM Strategy onsite workshop is only available on request to organizations that need to brief executives or users about the expected benefits, steps and resources for implementing Email Management. The EMM Practitioner track covers concepts and technologies for email management, and is available as an online or classroom training course leading to a Practitioner designation. It also incorporates the main elements from the EMM Strategy track. We recommend that you start with this program or the 4 day Master track. The EMM Specialist track covers global best practices for implementing email management in addition to advanced topics, and is available as an online or classroom training course leading to a Specialist designation. It builds on the Practitioner track, which is why we recommend you first take the Practitioner course. The EMM Master track provides you with a thorough understanding of email management, with the main elements from all the above training tracks, in addition to case study exercises. It is only available as a classroom training course. AIIM has also created a collection of slideshare presentations from the certificate programs to provide helpful overviews. The Email Management overview is available at www.slideshare.net/norwiz/what-is-email-management.