Are You Making This Crucial Mistake With E-mail?

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Here's an issue you may not have given much thought to, but that could become a major issue at some point: saving e-mail communications to employees and clients that contain company policy changes, contract changes, alerts or other critical communications.

So why not just save them in your inbox? Because eventually you'll run out of space; and searching through hundreds of thousands of e-mails is not always a simple and easy task. Here are 5 BIG reasons why you need an e-mail archiving system:

Compliance. While the e-mails and data subject to regulatory statutes varies by industry, ALL e-mails that contain employee and client records, contract negotiations, company policy changes and employee reviews and reprimands should be stored and archived for easy retrieval. Recently we have seen companies ask us about archiving in response to their auditor's risk management assessment (SAS 109/110, it's not just for accountants anymore!).
Litigation Support. If you are ever sued, you may be ordered by the court to produce documentation to support your case; such documentation includes e-mails (See eDiscovery). Problem is, pulling e-mails off a tape drive backup can be a massive undertaking. In one such case, USB Bank had to pay an IT firm over $265,000 to pull e-mail communications previously sent.
Free Up Storage Space. If you've ever had your e-mail stop working because you've exceeded your storage space, you know how frustrating this can be. Archiving eliminates this problem finally and forever. Additionally, certain email programs will become unstable and possibly corrupt when they grow too big.
Improve Workflow Systems And Procedures. Another upside to e-mail archiving is your ability to search, document and organize information pertaining to servicing customers, delivering a product, sending out an RFP, selecting vendors, etc.
Ease Of Finding E-mails. Let's face it; we've all had the daunting task of trying to find an e-mail sent months ago. An e-mail archiving system would allow you to perform searches of both keywords and attachments to find e-mails in minutes - even seconds - rather than hours or days.

The good news is that this protecting yourself may be easier than you think. Chances are the tools are already there. Just contact your IT professional and make sure that you have an archiving plan in place and discuss the points above (of course if you have neither, you may contact me... ok, enough with the shameless plug!). If you decide it is time to make a plan just be sure that the plan includes the following:

Automated Archiving - If you can, use technology to your advantage. Don't rely on your best intentions, most mainstream E-mail software includes an archiving function that can be automated. If you are using Outlook with an Exchange server, you can set it up to archive all your folders the same way or by individual folders. Mine is set up so that my sent items and inbox automatically archives anything over 6 months old. I have other less important folders set to delete E-mails after 1 year.

Archive File is Part of Regular Backup - I don't mean to beat you up on backup in this article (but I will anyway!), but this is something that is often overlooked. And since E-mail is more than just jokes and videos, make sure your backup is safe! My archive folder is saved on a network drive so that it is backed up every night with everything else on the server. More often than not, we find E-mail archive folders saved to a local file (My Documents, for example). This solution is fine as long as it is included in the backup job, which often it is not.

Easy to Find and Use -This goes back to ease of finding E-mail. It is great to backup everything, but make sure you can get to it when you need it. I cannot easily get to my archives if I am not connected to my office server. This is OK for me since I can easily connect and because I don't normally need access to something over 6 months old, but take such things into account when archiving.

Once you have a system framework in place, tweak it for optimum performance. Remember, it does not have to be perfect, just functional.

Tune in next time as I discuss why "innocent" E-mail messages that your employees send may not be so innocent to you!