Managing e-mail is serious business because of growing legal and regulatory requirements. In December, government regulators fined five major brokerages a total of $8.25 million for failing to comply with e-mail record-keeping requirements. The courts also are forcing companies involved in litigation to hand over e-mails along with other documents.
"It is commonly recognized that e-mails can be business records of a company," says Chanley Howell, a partner in the Jacksonville office of Foley & Lardner who specializes in information technology law. "There's really no distinction between electronic records and paper records."
Game plan
Managing e-mail boils down to three things: A consistent policy, easy-to-maintain software and training. In developing a company policy, Howell says that saving every e-mail is not the answer. "That creates storage problems and retrieval problems," he says.
Deciding what to toss is perhaps the most difficult step. A diverse group of employees should come up with examples of what records are important to the business. Check with the appropriate state and federal regulatory agencies that govern the business for any specific industry rules that must be followed. Then the company should come up with a policy, taking into consideration general business practices as well as any pending litigation. "You can't keep just what you think is good and not what is bad," says Howell.
Once the company decides which e-mails to keep and which to toss, it's time to check out software programs designed to store and retrieve the important e-mail and permanently delete the junk. Of e-mail management software, Greg Clock, vice president of the messaging business group at Mountain View, Calif.-based Legato Systems, says, "A year ago, it was nice to have, but there were no compelling reasons." He adds: "With new legislation and actual fines, now there's tremendous interest."
Legato makes a suite of e-mail software products, including Email Archive, Email Xtender and Email Xaminer -- the last designed to help companies comply with laws and regulations.
Deleting e-mail isn't as simple as it sounds. When an employee deletes a message from an inbox, he also must empty his trash or recycle bin to delete it from the workstation. But the e-mail message typically remains on the hard drive. Products such as Ontrack Data Recovery Services' DataEraser and PowerQuest's DataGone will, however, completely eliminate an e-mail or any other file by overwriting the data on a hard drive.
With a policy in place and software installed, the final step in e-mail management is training employees on what to save and how to save it. "There are more cases of people deleting e-mail and then wanting it back," says Jim Reinert, director of business development for Ontrack.
As companies become more comfortable with e-mail management, the next wave of compliance is likely to focus on instant messaging, a communication tool that some companies already ban. "I think that there will be requirements coming down," says Legato's Clock.
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