Leveraging existing resources to archive e-mail.

E-mail has replaced the written memo of the past. With a majority of companies relying on electronic communications even more than the telephone, efficiently storing and accessing archived e-mail messages is a top priority for IT administrators and executives. Although you might not be a financial services or auditing firm where archiving is mandated by government regulations, implementing e-mail retention and archiving policies can help you win a lawsuit or other dispute. A recent project conducted by market research firm Osterman Research concluded that in nearly 80% of organizations, e-mail is used to confirm business transactions, and nearly one in four organizations have been involved in a dispute with a supplier or customer over an e-mail related issue.

With emaciated IT budgets, enterprises face the challenge of how to effectively store and easily recall specific e-mails from a pool of thousands of messages. This article will address how IT administrators can leverage existing e-mail technologies to ease the process of e-mail management with minimal IT expenditure.

Define Scope

Work with your legal department and business managers to determine which departments and employees are candidates for e-mail retention. Once you have identified the users, begin archiving one group at a time. Do not try to do everything at once; start with the most important accounts (i.e. the executives), then the financial staff, and then perhaps the human resources staff.

Define Methodology

When utilizing existing e-mail server functionality, there are essentially two ways to get messages into an archive: either mirror the account, or move based on message aging.

Mirroring: Mirroring is the easier of the two methods. You simply set up server side rules to archive all incoming and outgoing messages for pre-determined accounts. The server delivers inbound messages to the user's inbox, and also automatically places a copy into the archive, essentially mirroring the account.

While there is no intervention or training required for the end-users with this method, it does have a major downside: if you provide IMAP services, you effectively double the storage required for each account, which may prove too costly for some organizations.

Message Aging: With the message aging, the server delivers messages normally both to and from the account. The IT staff implements procedures to move messages out of the account's folders and into the archive based on their age. With this method, you must train your end users to ensure the messages are handled properly before the move to the archive.

Set Retention Policies

Plan to keep messages on your IMAP server for some set period of time, and then move older messages to secondary storage. For example, from their desktop, users would have access to messages on the server for 2003-2004. But messages from 2002 would reside in the archive. To retrieve those, the user would have to search through the archive for that year.

Train End Users

Probably the most crucial component to successful archiving is user buy-in for the project. You must ensure that your organization's e-mail handling policies are well thought out and communicated to the users. Useful policies include:

* Do not delete any e-mail containing company-related information. The archive process should be the only method of removing corporate-related messages from folders

* Develop naming conventions for messages, folders and subfolders across the organization. This will make it easier to manage messages by getting them out of the inbox, and also to find information both on the IMAP server and in the archive

* Save copies of all outgoing messages in a sent items folder

* Do not save local copies of corporate messages. This keeps important information on the server and off employees' desktops, laptops, and home machines

* Offer secure webmail to allow employees on the road access to corporate e-mail, so they do not use public services like Hot-mail or Yahoo

* Ensure that delegated administration is read only. The owner of the account should be the only the person sending messages out--no one should send on behalf of another.

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A Useful Archive

However you choose to get your data into the archive, the keys to having a USEFUL archive are:

* The data must reside in an area that guarantees read-only access. Make sure no one can tamper with the archive. To be useful as evidence, the data must meet reliability standards

* The data must be easy to access and query. If the data is easily accessible to the end users, they do not need administrator assistance to retrieve archived messages

* Have a strict, policy-based data destruction policy. Now that it has become a crime to destroy e-mail records that might be used in an investigation, if you systematically delete e-mails after they have reached a certain age, you protect yourself and your organization from culpability.

Include Instant Messaging 

Instant messaging is a popular corporate communication tool that warrants archiving as much as e-mail. If your users are hooked on IM, but sending corporate information around on public networks, consider a secure standards-based IM solution, preferably one that is integrated with your e-mail system. You will be able to leverage the e-mail archiving strategy that you develop to include instant messaging as well.

Outsourced Archiving

If archiving seems like a daunting task, consider outsourcing and letting a third party manage your e-mail archiving. Several small and large vendors currently offer this service. Even AT&T is getting into the act having just rolled out AT&T E- Mail Archiving, "a fully managed service to help businesses and U.S. government agencies comply with complex industry and federal data retention regulations, while they simultaneously grapple with the exponential storage growth driven by the proliferation of e-mail communication."

While it is not free, benefits of outsourcing include:

* No up-front investment in hardware or software

* Guaranteed tamper-proof store

* An accessible (preferably online) store

* Automatic policy-driven data destruction

Long Term Benefit

Whether you adopt a rudimentary archiving policy retaining copies of e-mails sent to and from your corporate executives or go all out and save every electronic message for every employee, anything that helps you better manage your enterprise messaging environment will pay for itself over time. And if someday your organization is in the midst of an expensive dispute, and you provide the piece of electronic evidence that saves the day--well, that's priceless.

Joanne Menapace is product marketing manager and Vladimir Butenko is CEO at Stalker Software (Mill Valley, CA)

www.stalker.com