Email is common to all businesses large and small. It is as necessary as the telephone for communicating business needs and transactions.

It has been estimated that the average employee sends and receives over 70 emails per day, totaling over 2.5 billion messages in the United States alone. Even assuming an average size of 10K bytes and factoring in an exponential growth rate there is no question that archiving and storing of emails will continue to be a most important consideration in all data centers.

To achieve efficient management of the archival and storage process an IT organization must decide on classification categories, indexing, search strings, retrieval capabilities, audit controls, legal discovery and other factors.

Companies need to classify their messages into categories that are appropriate to their business needs. The first step is to identify the business processes within your company. If your company is a manufacturing business then some categories might include: suppliers, distributors, parts and customers. These categories, such as customers, can be further refined into tiers such as retail, wholesale and discount customers. The same concept applies for your supplier category which can be sub-categorized into domestic and international. Separating your email into categories based on business processes will make it easier for retrieval purposes later. Only when email contents are appropriately classified can they then be indexed, retained, and discovered.

It is also possible to leverage categorization work that has already been done in the company. For example, many companies can leverage the categories and classifications already identified as key business processes in applications from vendors such as SAP, TIBCO and others. And if a company is already using any kind of enterprise content management system then that is another database which can beb  used to help categorize emails.

Automated classification can consist of tagging messages based on rules and integration with systems and applications that apply existing policies to email messages.

Once categorized and classified, email documents can be indexed for faster retrieval at a moment’s notice. And the destruction of email, when legal to do so, will also benefit from this process. In addition, the use of a proven search engine can facilitate the information retrieval process. Later, audit capabilities can be added to monitor the dates, times, user information and actions that occur within the archived email repository. Such audit capabilities can be used to satisfy the requirements of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act or the review of regulatory agencies such as the SEC and NASD.

Correctly categorizing and classifying your email can save your company time and money later on when needed.