Effective Email Management for the Organization

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Effective Email Management for the Organization
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Agenda

• Defining the issue
• Business, legal, and regulatory issues
• Approaches to managing email
• Elements of an email policy
• Additional resources

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Email defining the issue

• First email was sent in 1971
• Today more email is sent every day than the USPS
  delivers in a year
• 11 billion emails a day in the US alone
• More than 57 billion a day world-wide
• NOT including spam
• 60 or more of business-critical information is
  stored within messaging systems

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Email management defined

• According to AIIM, The ECM Association, the
  essence of email management is that
• As the de facto standard for business
  communication, removing emails from the server
  and saving them to a repository isn't enough.
  Email must be classified, stored, and destroyed
  consistent with business standards-just as any
  other document or record.

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Email management is NOT

• Saving all email messages forever
• Saving all email messages in the messaging
  application
• Setting arbitrary time limits for all messages
• Setting arbitrary mailbox sizes for all users
• Declaring email as a record series
• Doing nothing

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Email the 50,000 ft. view

• Why are we sending so much email?
• Its easy
• Its less formal
• Its nearly instantaneous
• Its asynchronous
• Its convenient
• Well

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Business, Legal, and Regulatory Issues
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Business issues

• Email storage costs
• Up to 200 GB email per month for 1,000-user
  company thats a lot of storage!
• Plus costs to back up to tape
• Each terabyte of email (or 5 months of email)
  costs 100,000 a year to manage
• Lost productivity due to managing email costs
  120 per user per month, or 120,000/month

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Business issues contd

• Email retrieval costs
• It takes more than 11 hours to recover an email
  more than 1 year old from an archive
• Typically have to restore the entire tape to a
  spare (!) server to find the desired message(s)
• 29 of organizations would not be able to restore
  an email message over 6 months old

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Legal issues

• Electronic discovery for a Fortune 500 company
  costs an average of 750,000 per case
• 75 of the demands for discovery are for email
• Courts may look negatively on discovery provided
  in other than native format
• but may also require that it be provided in an
  accessible format (rather than backup tape)
• New Federal Rules of Civil Procedure

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Regulatory and recordkeeping issues

• Email messages can be records
• Email has to be accessible todayand tomorrow
• Email systems and formats
• Attachments and their formats
• Media and hardware issues
• Email messages might be records but email is
  NOT a series!

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When is an email a record?

• When statutorily defined
• When it documents a business transaction
• When it supports a business decision
• When the attachment is a record

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Who manages the message?

• YOU have to manage an email
• You receive from outside the organization
• You send, either internally or to someone outside
  the organization
• Designate someone to manage messages sent to
  groups/lists

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Email and records management

• Need to keep email record through retention
  period
• Then need to destroy them according to records
  policy
• Email must be managed centrally

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Email and records management

• Message archives are discoverable
• The deleted messages box is discoverable
• Individual messages and personal copies are
  discoverable
• The more user intervention required, the less
  users will comply

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Email attachments

• Attachments may form part of an email record
• Whether to store with the email record or not
  depends on the system used
• Some systems store the attachments separately but
  linked, while others maintain the entire record
  as one object
• At a minimum the email record should note the
  name of any attachments

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Approaches to Managing Email
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Approaches to managing email today

• Policy approaches to retention
• Do nothing
• Let users manage their own email
• Keep everything forever
• Delete all messages older than X
• Limit mailbox size to X
• Declare and manage email as records

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Approaches to managing email today

• Technology approaches to retention
• Outsource it!
• As email comes into the main server, by rules
• After email sent to inboxes, but managed by rules
• Decentralized employees do it
• Messages on the server
• Messages in .PST/.NSF files

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System requirements for email management

• System must store and retain messages sent or
  received
• Attachments must be kept, either attached to the
  message or separately and linked
• Metadata must be captured accurately
• Name of sender and addressee(s)
• Not nicknames, codes, distribution lists
• Date/time sent
• Other transmission data as necessary
• Calendar items, receipts, CC/BCCs

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Technologies for managing email

• Email messaging applications
• Print file
• Backup tapes
• Email archival applications
• ECRM solutions
• Outsourced email solutions

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Messaging system

• Not built to store massive amounts of messages
• And attachments
• And records management
• And document management
• Difficult to search across inboxes
• Discovery, auditing

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Print file

• Common approach
• Challenges
• Loss of metadata
• Attachments
• Typical threaded email message
• Volume of traffic to print and to file
• Authenticity (phishing)

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Backup tapes

• Archival vs. backup
• Backups store data, not files or messages
• Multiple copies of data
• Readability of older tapes
• Format, media, hardware

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Archival applications

• Move messages out of the messaging application
• Rules engine
• Can be automated
• Simple retention management
• Single instance storage

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ECRM solutions

• Most systems support email management
• Many support single-instance storage
• Allow declaration, management of messages as
  records
• Varying support for attachment management,
  metadata management

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Outsourced solutions

• Let someone else manage it!
• Microsoft Exchange Hosted Services
• Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail
• Many smaller/specialty providers
• Security considerations
• Privacy considerations
• Recordkeeping and discovery issues

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.PST and .NSF Files

• Used to store messages locally on PCs using
  Outlook or Lotus
• .PST files present a number of issues
• Lack of backup
• File size limited to 2GB (20GB in 2007)
• Multiple .PST files!
• So how do you deal with them?
• DONT!

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Email preservation issues

• Format of info
• HTML, RTF, text
• Format of message
• .msg, .eml, .txt, others
• Format of attachment(s)
• !
• Format of archive/storage system
• Exchange, Lotus, Groupwise, .pst, .nsf

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The action plan for email management
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The messaging policy

• Guiding principles
• Guidelines for acceptable usage
• Guidelines for email stewardship
• Throughout the message lifecycle

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Messaging procedures

• Determining status of message
• Classification
• Management of message, metadata, attachment(s)
• Retention and disposition
• Communication and training
• Audit

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Communication

• Tone at the top
• Business benefits vs. compliance
• Different approaches for different audiences
• Awareness
• Training
• Ongoing communications

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Technology support

• All of the technologies described
• Force archiving out to the network
• Turn archiving off completely
• TANSTAASB

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Auditing compliance

• Periodic checks
• Statistical sampling
• No exceptions!
• Identify gaps in compliance
• Address the gaps

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Elements of an Email Policy
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Email policy principles

• Email belongs to the organization, not the
  individual
• Email is not a records series unto itself
• Email management program must comply with
  appropriate regulatory requirements
• Policy has to be followed and enforced!
• May also address appropriate use, employee
  training, notification of abuse, etc.

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Elements of an email policy

• That email messages can be records
• Guidelines for what information must be stored
  and where
• Identification of what metadata must be captured
  and linked to individual records
• Guidelines for ensuring email records are
  accessible throughout retention period

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Elements of an email policy

• Risk mitigation
• Disposition
• Integrity of the system and messages
• Attachments

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Elements of an email policy

• Process for establishing disposition holds
• Process for disaster recovery
• Process for auditing the effectiveness of the
  program

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Questions?
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Conclusion

• We have to manage messaging technologies better
• It starts with policies and procedures
• Technology can help
• Communicate, communicate, communicate
• Enforce the program

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Additional resources

• E-Mail Rules, Nancy Flynn and Randolph Kahn Esq.,
  ePolicy Institute
• ANSI/ARMA 9-2004, Requirements for the Management
  of Electronic Messages as Records, ARMA
  International
• ANSI/ARMA TR2-2007, Procedures and Issues for
  Managing Electronic Messages as Records, ARMA
  International

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For more information

• Jesse Wilkins
• CDIA, LIT, edp, ICP, ermm, ecmm, bpms
• Access Sciences Corporation
• jwilkins_at_accesssciences.com
• http//www.accesssciences.com
• Blog http//informata.blogspot.com
• [phone] direct