The benefits associated with archiving Microsoft Exchange email and associated data, creates many cost effective solutions. Archiving facilitates government regulatory or civil litigation searches for ediscovery requests. It also allows for more complete archive journaling, and provides storage benefits for both mailbox growth and the various storage devices that can be utilized.

Although lowering storage reduction costs is a common denominator for email archiving, compliance requirements are moving more companies to implementing archiving strategies. Depending on the motivation factors, cost savings on storage are subject to interpretation by different people.  For some people, compressing email could reduce licensing, as well as storage hardware costs.  For others it may mean creating a mailbox for end users, which has virtually unlimited space.

Continue reading Archive Stubbing Techniques Not Recommended

The Florida Legislature recently suffered some embarrassment as a result of its lack of an email retention policy – or, more accurately, the inadequacy of its retention policy. Background: former House Speaker accepted a $110,000 per year position with the Northwest Florida State College after, supposedly, being one of the driving forces behind the state funding directed to the College while Speaker. The press caught wind of a possible scandal and attempted to obtain copies of emails between Sansom and the College. And that’s when it emerged that the Legislature had no real form of email retention policy: sent items were routinely purged after 30 days and deleted items were routinely purged after 90 days.

It’s time for the Florida House and Senate to join the 21st century. If lawmakers are going to use 21st-century technologies to communicate with the public and one another, they should take steps to ensure these communications are preserved — and accessible to the public,  read the editorial in TCPalm.

So, why weren’t the Legislature hanging onto their emails for longer? Because of storage constraints, seemingly. Sorry, but that’s a really lame excuse. Storage is dirt cheap and the price point of archiving solutions puts them well within reach of even smaller businesses. According to the Panama City News Herald:

The average House member uses about 569 megabytes of server space each month, with the average senator using about 700 megabytes, the documents said. Both are less than the 1 gigabyte of space available on an iPod Shuffle, Apple Inc.’s smallest portable music player, which holds about 500 songs. A free e-mail account from Google Inc. gives each user about 7,300 megabytes of space.

The House spends about $124,000 yearly on maintaining the system, according to Legislature information.

For that much, the House could also archive e-mail for three years, said Forrester Research analyst Chris Voce, who studies IT infrastructure. Upkeep for the House’s 750 users that would retain e-mails for three years should cost about $108,000 annually, Voce said.

Exactly. Retaining your email is actually pretty cheap these days – and the cost of retaining it can certainly be less than the cost of losing it.

Continue reading Here Today, Gone in 30 Days or The Need of Email Archiving

The folks over at Techdirt have posted an interesting article about the UK’s new email law that requires ISPs to save every single email sent in the UK for a period of one year. There are several problems with that:

There’s been an ongoing push around the world by law enforcement to require ISPs to retain certain types of data, in case it comes in handy later for criminal investigations. Of course, these demands come from the wishful thinking department. The cost associated with such data retention is tremendous, and all it does is create a huge mass of data — often making it more difficult to find the useful information. In the UK, they’ve put in place new data retention laws that will require ISPs to retain records on every email sent or received in the UK for a year. It’s not the contents of the email — but just the data on that email. That, alone, though, seems like a pretty big violation of privacy, and people are starting to point that out.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out as it doesn’t look like the law can reasonably or even legally be enforced as it stands now.

What’s up with all these government people ignoring good email archiving protocol? It seems that several officials lately, who are presumably well educated and should know better, are coming out with their own brand of wisdom which says they should be allowed to delete emails after way too short a time.

ITWorld’s James Gaskin’s article, “E-mail archiving stupidity“, gets right to the point and pulls no punches. Gaskin reports that Dallas County officials want to delete email after 90 days, and asks, “have none of them heard of all the new regulations about e-mail archiving?” He also notes that the governor of Texas recently got the state’s Attorney General to issue a ruling that he could delete his own e-mails after one week. I think the governor needs to add a gallon or two to his ten-gallon hat, because the one he’s got on is obviously cutting off circulation to his brain. Delete e-mails after a week? Are you kidding me? Why on earth would anybody advocate such a thing, especially for a government official? This is sheer nonsense, and very probably against the law.

Continue reading Email Archiving Nonsense in the Big D

According to Christopher S. Rugaber of The Associated Press, companies that help businesses track and search their e-mails and other electronic data are experiencing a surge of interest in the wake of a 2006 federal rule changes that clarify requirements to produce such evidence in lawsuits.

Companies used to be focused on how they store information. Now they’re focusing on how to retrieve it.

The new rules require U.S. companies to keep better track of their employees’ emails, instant messages and other electronic documents in the event the companies are sued, legal experts say. They are part of amendments to federal rules governing civil litigation and were approved by the Supreme Court’s administrative arm in April after a five-year review.

Continue reading U.S. Rules favour Email Storage and Retrieval

I like the new Google phone, which was made available by T-Mobile last week. Long-term, it’s going to be a mighty competitor to the Apple iPhone. The presence of smartphones in general, whether they are from Google, Apple, RIM, or anybody else, has made mobile email part of the enterprise. It has become commonplace for executives, sales reps, and other corporate road warriors to check and send company email while at lunch, on the road, or at a kid’s ballet recital–and there’s no doubt that this has been a tremendous boon for productivity. But what about email security and archiving? The folks in the back office handling email security and trying to stay compliant with archiving policies and regulations aren’t so happy about it.

Without a formal procedure in place, the path of least resistance is for road warriors to simply use their smartphones with free public email accounts, such as Hotmail or Gmail, but this is a corporate no-no (as we learned in the case of Ms. Palin) since it completely bypasses all corporate (or government agency, as the case may be) policies and precautions. Continue reading Google phone faces some limitations on corporate email

As if Troopergate weren’t enough, vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin is facing a new scandal. She’s now being accused of using her Yahoo email account to conduct official government business, and of doing so to avoid email compliancy and archive requirements, as well to avoid subpoenas related to the Troopergate scandal. But wait, there’s more.

Time Magazine is reporting that her email account was compromised by hackers. The Wikileaks website has published several screenshots of messages and other data hackers claim they got from one of two Yahoo accounts. The hacker group Anonymous, which is associated with the infamous message board 4Chan (known for the DoS style “pranks” they play on numerous websites) has taken responsibility for the attack. Continue reading Sarah Palin Possibly Facing Emailgate?

The best server hardware configuration is in place for SMTP mail routing. Back up building generators are available in the office building.  Uninterruptible power supplies, with UPS monitoring software, are connected to the email servers.  So brown outs, electrical spikes and blackouts are in place to maintain server functionality.  Top of the line archiving and back up software has been implemented.

Then that one time comes along. The CEO’s office or a senior manager makes a request to access an archived email that has an important document attached. The email or or attached document cannot be accessed.

One would think with all these safe guards in place data integrity should never be an issue. It’s a funny thing.  When mr. disaster comes along, he usually brings his very close cousin, Murphy’s law. Continue reading Email Administrator Career Risk Management

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. Continue reading Email Policy: Who Gets Legal Access?

A new study commissioned by GFI Software revealed that a lack of education is responsible for lack of email archiving found in most U.K. businesses. Of the 408 IT managers surveyed, a whopping 51% admitted they hadn’t yet implemented email archiving. 32% said they didn’t feel it was necessary or didn’t feel they had the expertise needed to make such a move, while 28% said it was simply too expensive.

“It is clear that there is a degree of education required in the market and that despite the clear benefits that many are seeing, the lack of appreciation of the utility of email archiving is concerning,” said David Vella, Director of Product Management at GFI.
“Resellers now have a unique opportunity to inform their target customer base of the benefits they are missing out on, and perhaps more importantly, the risks they are running by failing to implement these safeguards,” he added. Continue reading Lack Of Education Primary Reason For Not Archiving Email