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.

The majority of Microsoft Exchange Server archiving solutions have some form of compression that reduces the size of overall archived emails.  For an Exchange email administrator, an unlimited space mailbox really just means eliminating the user responsibility of being concerned about having to archive their email. This allows mailboxes to grow as long as there is more than adequate disk space real estate available to allow seamless expansion.  The limitations of unlimited mailboxes are usually determined by the archiving options provided by the archiving solution. According to the Ferris Research blog, Microsoft recommends against using stubbing techniques.  Microsoft further recommends using 3rd party email archiving solutions that allow configurations to move email messages completely out of the mailbox without leaving stubbing foot prints  inside the mailbox.

6 different stubbing techniques are provided below only for informational purposes, but are not best practices recommended by Microsoft.

1. Substitute body and attachment with a plain text Stub
2. Substitute body attachment with HTML Stub
3. Maintain plain text body only with deleted attachment
4. Maintain HTML message body only, with deleted attachment
5. Maintain HTML body and image with deleted attachment
6. Message attachment residing in the archives

Will your current archiving procedures or planned archiving solution meet all future email storage requirements?

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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.

Of course, storage constraints are not the only reason that some organizations choose not to retain their email. Some think that they do not need to (reading the posts here should set them straight on that). Others realize that they should be retaining but delay implemeting a solution because they become bogged down with details. In a recent post, Carl E. Reid said:

“Before the email archiving software selection process starts or any implementation meetings begin, something more important must occur first.  Quite a few questions regarding email retention policy must be answered.  This is a difficult, but very necessary process.”

I don’t completely agree with Carl on that. If you’re not currently archiving your email, you need to be – and you need to be doing so as soon as possible. It’s as simple as that. And what this means is that you shouldn’t delay implementing a solution because you haven’t clearly and completely defined your retention policies. Yup, there’s certainly some basics that you need to sort out before choosing a solution (you need one that matches your needs), but you do not need to nail down every last detail.

Define your needs. Choose a solution that will meet those needs. Get it up and running as soon as possible. And then work on fine tuning it.

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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.

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New UK Email Law Spurs Privacy Concerns

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.

The email deletion policy has naturally got a lot of people down in the “Big D” concerned, and a recent article in the Dallas Morning News highlights some of the criticism. Presently, according to the article, Dallas County stores all of its email on computer tapes at an off-site warehouse, and complains that maintaining it is expensive and impractical, and the best way to save money is to automatically delete emails after 90 days. The Dallas officials are obviously a little behind the times. First of all, they are right to say that using computer tape storage is expensive and impractical. But here’s a news flash for these rocket scientists down there: There are alternatives to computer tape storage. Lots of them, which are cheaper and more efficient, and a whole lot easier to search and restore. Save your tape storage for use in migrating your oldest archives, but using it for recent storage is completely unnecessary, massively inefficient, and generally bad policy. 

The Dallas proposal also specifies that employees can save emails from the 90-day deletion by individually archiving them to meet state mandates for retention, but do you really want to put this much authority in the hands of thousands of individual employees? This needs to be governed by a uniform policy, and carried out on an automated basis, and not left to the discretion of individuals. The risk of the improper deletion of an email that should have been saved is just too great. Under such a policy, it’s only a matter of time before an email that is needed turns up missing, and then who is going to take the blame? Heads will roll, but it won’t be the mayor, the governor or the head of IT. It will be some poor, underpaid clerk in the records department, who was improperly trained to begin with, and had no idea that the email in question should have been retained.

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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.

Amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) PRIMER
The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) govern civil procedure in the United States district courts. New amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure address the discovery of electronically stored information. On April 12, 2006, the Supreme Court of the United States approved and forwarded these amendments to Congress. Certain revisions to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure address the preservation and discovery of data in electronic media, also known as e-Discovery.

Electronic discovery (e-Discovery or ediscovery) refers to “any process in which electronic data is sought, located, secured and searched with the intent of using it as evidence in a civil or criminal legal case.”

In regards to ECM and ERM, the two rules to focus on are FRCP 26(b)(5) and FRCP 34(b). FCRP 26(b)5 deals with General Provisions Governing Discovery; Duty of Disclosure; Discovery Scope and Limits; and Claims of Privilege or Protection of Trial Preparation Materials. FRCP 34(b) focuses on the Production of Documents, Electronically Stored Information and Things. These amendments to FRCP address a common corporate problem: the volume of electronically stored information and its maintenance.

During an electronic discovery process, all types of data serve as evidence such as text, images, calendar files, databases, spreadsheets, audio files, animation, websites and computer programs. Because of lax corporate management, email is often the most valuable source of evidence in civil or criminal litigation.

“All organizations should proactively prepare for the amendments,” warns AIIM President John Mancini. “The new rules will require businesses to have continuous, ready access to, and control of, all electronically stored information that may be relevant to the discovery phase of the litigation process.”

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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.

But the genie is out of the bottle, and nobody wants to give up the ability to check and send email while standing in line at Starbuck’s waiting for a cappuccino. Fortunately, they won’t have to. As far as the iPhone goes, I think it’s overpriced and has far too many consumer-oriented gee-gaws on it to be useful in a corporate setting, but it does have an advantage over the Google phone at present for corporate use. The iPhone has a good interface with Microsoft Exchange, which makes it much more usable for corporate email than the Google phone. This of course, allows the security guys in the back room to breathe a little easier, impose the usual security precautions and spam/virus protection, and properly archive emails even if they originate from a mobile device.

In the coming months however, the Google phone may well become more useful in the corporate setting, simply because of its open scheme. Unlike Apple, it is a lot easier for third-party developers to create and market applications for the device–and it will be a simple matter to create an application that can link with corporate email. It’s only a matter of time before these applications start to surface, and the Google phone becomes more useful for corporate email.

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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.

The Secret Service requested copies of the hacked emails from the Associated Press, which refused, and the FBI is reportedly also launching an investigation. Stay tuned as it appears this is only the beginning of “Emailgate”.
 

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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.

The point is nothing should replace the performance of data integrity check “fire drills”. Assuming all is well, without manually checking, could very well impact your career.  Server memory caching issues could occur.  Data might be resting on bad pits on the hard drive. Similar to a car, anything that moves will eventually break or malfunction.

With all the best software and hardware in place, an administrator should still go the extra mile to take the following measures:

1. Develop a schedule (i.e. monthly, quarterly) to randomly pull back up tapes or retrieve archive data.

2. Select 10 to 12 instances from different email accounts for testing restores.

3. Select small, medium and very large mail boxes to restore.

4. Document the results.

5. Based on results, take any corrective action required.

6. Stick to this schedule and don’t allow other tasks to interrupt doing data integrity checks.

An ounce of prevention insures you are in a better position, should some unforeseen circumstance prevent data from being retrieved.  Data integrity checks are much more proactive to provide indications of necessary preventive steps to take.

This avoids or minimizes the spotlight being on you, as the administrator, should the scenario above come into play.  Within organizations most people do not give much credence to back up or archive data, until they need it.  Then the spotlight is placed very strongly on the administrator to deliver, on demand.  Many a person’s career has teetered on these singular types of requests for data restores.  So do your homework.

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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.

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”.

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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.

The risks indeed could be great. With the huge amount of data shared via email, much of it confidential or of critical importance, it’s always in a organization’s best interest to archive. Legally, it could literally save a company from disaster if they are ever called into court. It’s clear that in this day and age there really isn’t any good reason not to archive email.
 

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Lack Of Education Primary Reason For Not Archiving Email

An updated bulletin on using email archiving solutions was recently published by the  U. S. National Archives and Record Management Administration (NARA).  This bulletin provides questions and guidance to U. S. Federal agencies on using e-mail archiving applications and similar technologies for managing e-mail records. Good until 2010, the bulletin advises agencies that:

• Although e-mail archiving applications may provide business benefits to an agency, e-mail archiving applications can be limited in their capabilities to keep and organize records according to records management laws, regulations, and policies.
• If an agency decides to use e-mail archiving applications to manage Federal records the agency is responsible for addressing those areas where the applications do not meet the requirements of the Federal Records Act and applicable NARA regulations.

Below are some more highlights of this very interesting bulletin, which provides standards for all U. S. government agencies.

What are the requirements for managing e-mail messages as Federal records?

Record keeping systems that include electronic mail messages must:

• Provide for the grouping of related records into classifications according to the nature of the business purposes the records serve;
• Permit easy and timely retrieval of both individual records and files or other groupings of related records.
• Retain the records in a usable format for their required retention period as specified by a NARA-approved records schedule;
• Be accessible by individuals who have a business need for information in the system;
• Preserve the transmission and receipt data specified in agency instructions; and
• Permit transfer of permanent records to the National Archives and Records Administration (see 36 CFR 1228.270 and 36 CFR 1234.32(a)).

What are the benefits of e-mail archiving applications?
Depending on the agency and its business purposes, e-mail archiving applications may provide the following benefits. Each application has different features and different strengths, so this list is not exhaustive:

• More efficient storage of e-mail because it is moved from a distributed network of servers, desktop applications, and other places to be managed in one place;
• Enhanced electronic search capability for content that may be germane to a subpoena, Freedom of Information Act request, e-discovery request, or similar purpose;
• Assists in back-up and disaster recovery.

What else is NARA doing in regards to e-mail archiving applications?
NARA is monitoring Federal agencies deploying or considering deploying e-mail archiving applications in order to evaluate what steps agencies may take to ameliorate recordkeeping issues posed by this emerging technology. We continue to study e-mail archiving and recognize that software developments may eventually bring these technologies in closer accordance with good recordkeeping practices.

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U. S. National Archive Publishes Guidelines

Microsoft published a white paper on the subject of “Planning for large mailboxes with Exchange 2007″ last month, and this has caused some discussion about email stubbing around the blogosphere. Admittedly an arcane topic that not many people know or care about, stubbing can actually have a big impact on your email performance–but as it turns out, it’s not as easy as all that. At its essence, stubbing is just an archiving mechanism taht strips an email of its attachments, replaces it with a stub file or link within the message, and then stores the actual attachment in an archive.

Whether or not to stub emails should be a part of the discussion when planning for email storage, simply because storage–especially for a large enterprise–can be a problem. Deleting older emails is not an option for many companies, because it might violate regulations–and that’s why you can still find a five-year-old email message about a co-worker’s retirement party still floating around somewhere. Similarly, moving emails to backup tapes or PST files can also sometimes make it difficult to find an email, or may even result in loss. Seriously, have you ever tried to get one of the IT guys to go back into that little room over by the coffee machines where they keep the backup tapes and try to find anything? Not going to happen!

The Microsoft paper takes the position that stubbing can cause some search and performance problems over time, and instead, recommends that users of Exchange use a third-party email archiving solution to move old emails out of the email boxes completely and into an archive. This seems logical: Over time, an email inbox can get quite large, with tens of thousands of emails. And if you’re not allowed to delete any of them, that many messages–even if they’re just stubs–can quickly become unmanageable. And of course, since a stub file has very little information in it-sometimes only a message header–trying to find an old message becomes almost impossible. And so the solution isn’t cut-and-dried, and the answer is, “it depends.” Smaller email systems may well benefit from taking a stubbing approach, although medium-sized and large enterprise systems would probably do better with a pure archiving solution.

Microsoft’s approach, besides applying third-party archiving, is to recommend larger email boxes for Exchange, which makes sense, because as the paper points out, the volume and size of email continues ot increase daily, and end-users who have to spend time every day trying to manage a mailbox with a low quota is not going to be productive.

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Email stubbing not always a good idea

When it comes to being able to track historical emails, archiving has a distinct functionality.  Backup tapes won’t archive threaded email conversations.  Backup tapes only capture email that is available at that moment in time. A deleted email never gets captured by a back up tape.  On the other hand, archiving allows for retrieving even deleted emails.

The retrieval of information from back up tapes is usually very inconvenient.  Depending on how far back email messages require restoration, it could take an hour, to a day or longer to acquire the tapes.  If the tape is on site, the delay isn’t too long. Off site tape storage definitely create longer delays in the restoration process. After the time lag from request to email restoration, the email user then says “I can’t find the emails”. The tape pull process starts over again.  Many times it can be a guessing game, because people don’t remember what day, year or month they lost the emails.

Requesting a tape pull, receiving the tape, mounting the tape and then spinning it up are all variables of what can often be a very long time delay. Archiving eliminates the intermediary role a system administrator must play.  What if the email user could retrieve historical emails themselves?  Archiving software, such as GFI MailArchiver, empowers the email user community.  Imagine an email administrator has now set it up so staff can immediately retrieve missing or historical emails.  This allows the administrator to appear to be a super star.

Oh sure, people may still go through the guessing game.  The turn around time is minimal with an archiving system. People can guess about the date, location of missing email, but search time is less. People can also skip around quicker to find what they are looking for.

When it comes to file retention compliance issues, archiving systems are the best solution for preserving historical emails and documents.

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Archiving and Back Ups are 2 Different Animals