Email Storage Policies
What was good yesterday may not be good enough today...

by Debi Riedel
Director of Technology Resources
Datatrend Technologies

In the wake of new legislation, existing storage management policies and procedures, related to email, may need to be reviewed.

Common techniques of:

• mail server backups
• automated ‘delete-all’ retention policies
• individuals held responsible for saving ‘relevant’ e-mails in personal foldersmay no longer be practical or cost effective storage management methods for managing e-mail (volume or activity).  

Businesses whom have adopted automatic deletion policies may be deleting e-mail needed to support litigation and legal discovery; along with the potential for being held liable for spoliation of evidence.

Methods employing the recovery of ‘entire’ e-mail servers for a specific dates or events can be labor intensive, cost prohibitive, and not even possible, depending on the volume needed to be recovered.  

In order to develop an appropriate email policy, each organization will need to carefully examine and evaluate their individual business, legal, and regulatory requirements, determining what is needed to ensure adequate compliance levels can be maintained and managed.  

Based on the requirements review, e-mail repositories, archive and indexing tools may be deemed more manageable and cost effective methods for supporting new requirements and necessary e-mail policy changes. 

Not every organization will require changes, or use the same approach to e-mail retention.  All organizations can take comfort in knowing they have done their homework once they have clearly identified their e-mail retention policy and implemented the ‘correct’ solution for their specific needs.

Datatrend's TrendSetter eNewsletter
January 15, 2004