2008: year of e-mail management.

While many companies are not prepared to meet the revised 2006 Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) requirements, 64 percent of firms do plan to implement e-mail retention policies this year, according to a recent survey. And that's good because doing so will better prepare them for litigation while helping them meet some of the FRCP e-discovery requirements.

First, the bad news: The "MessageOne Email Archiving Practices Survey" of IT professionals, conducted in fall 2007 by Osterman Research for MessageOne, found that more than 65 percent of U.S. businesses are unprepared to meet the FRCP requirements for the discovery and handling of electronic evidence. The revised FRCP set rules for the discovery of electronically stored information (ESI) and strict penalties for the destruction of evidence. The revised FRCP also includes safe-harbor provisions to protect organizations that implement standard retention policies for ESI.

The "E-mail Archiving Practices Survey," along with several other studies over the past year, showed that organizations are unprepared to the extent that:

* 53 percent of companies lack a policy for e-mail retention and deletion.

* 67 percent of companies allow individual end users to determine how long messages are kept by the company.

* 66 percent of companies do not have the e-mail archiving technology required to manage e-mail retention, litigation holds, and e-discovery.

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"The survey reveals serious legal issues for organizations that are either ignoring the new federal mandates for compliance and e-discovery or are clearly not well educated on how to meet the technical requirements," Michael Osterman, CEO of Osterman Research, said in a press release. "Many recent court cases have shown that companies are expected to show a clear retention policy. The time is now for all companies to set and manage retention policies for their entire organization."

Osterman found that e-mail retention policies vary greatly among those companies that have set them. For example:

* 47 percent of companies have implemented e-mail retention policies.

* 36 percent of companies keep all messages for the duration of their policy, while 64 percent vary retention policies based on predefined criteria. Within this group, 50 percent vary retention policies by user, department, or business unit, and 50 percent set policies by message content.

* The average retention period varies greatly: 21 percent of companies keep messages, on average, for more than five years; 43 percent keep messages for one to five years; 36 percent of companies retain messages for less than one year.

* 77 percent of companies have at least one retention policy dictating that messages are kept more than five years; 36 percent have a policy requiring that some messages are kept for longer than 10 years.