A human resources and recruiting associate sent me an email with questions regarding email archiving procedures in companies.  Although not meant to give legal advice, sharing this should provide food for thought in how the role of email administrators is expanding.  Updating or developing procedures regarding access to email accounts is becoming a very hot issue.  Now is good time for the IT team to initiate meetings with other key departments.

We end up playing traffic cop to various types of requests for access to current and archived email.  This should provide food for thought in developing or modifying IT department procedures for processing requests for access to email accounts.

General standard practice is each employee only has access to their mail box and the email administrator(s), for troubleshooting purposes. Sometimes a manager or director may request to have access to all or some of their staff mail boxes. This is a rare exception.

Legal department – do the legal teams have full access to all firm email or only access to subpoena’s email/data? Access to email accounts is usually done by exception request. When a subpoena is presented to the law department, they contact the manager of the specific employee in question.  The department manager makes a request to the IT department. The law department can and has contacted the IT department directly for mail box access.

Who generates the subpoena’s data, onsite technology department  or an outside firm? The internal IT department is the lead area for providing access to each particular mail box, when it comes to legal matters or an internal company employee related issue.

Human Resources – do the HR teams have full access to all firm email, or only to email/data approved by legal in the event of an employee issue? HR does not have full access to all company email accounts.  Like any other department, the HR director can ask for access to their departmental staff boxes. HR directors usually cannot request access to other employee mail boxes in other departments.  Although a rare request, HR will go through legal for access to a particular mail box in another department.

Business department heads – do they see their team’s email? Although no firm procedures are usually in place, Department heads can have access to employee mail boxes, if a written request is provided.

Technology – if there is a local system how is the access to the data for support purposes handled?  Do all support engineers have access to the data from the back end (database) for support purposes or is there an approval process if there is a production problem? Only Email administrators have full access to email accounts.  A network support engineer would only have full access to email accounts, if that person is also an email administrator. No approval is required to go into a mail box, other than an email user saying “I have an email issue”.