Businesses building email archives

For business, legal, and ethical reasons, managing and protecting the content of email is now more important than it's ever been. As you'd expect, the number of emails sent by companies worldwide last year overshadowed the number sent in 2004. Among the spam and chit-chat was a veritable mountain of email containing business contracts and agreements, purchase intentions and project sign-offs. There were also threats and accusations, rants and wrongful dismissals - and emails containing objectionable material.

Roger Cockayne, managing director of data centre and email storage firm Revera, says technologically, email was never designed to be the monster it has become.

"It is now a legal document and there are standards around the way business emails should be saved and stored. But email didn't traditionally lend itself to being broken up, searched and secured," says Cockayne.

He says while software tools now exist to do just that, smaller companies can't always afford them. Among the best are solutions from Computer Associates and Wellington company AfterMail (whose email management prowess resulted in a recent multi-million dollar buy-out by US firm Quest Software.) Cockayne says these providers and others deliver the rules-based management and search systems businesses need to manage email. Important email attachments can be placed in an online searchable database with the rest of the email stored elsewhere to save on storage space. Copies of the full and original email as it came into the organisation can be kept for legal purposes. Outsourced services like Revera's 'Data Cloud' store business data including email online for searching and quick access.

"While tape [storage] is great for capacity, it can take weeks to track and access individual emails stored that way," says Cockayne.

Clearly, there is a need for emails to be protected, stored, searched and then re-accessed by the businesses that own them. But where does the average business start?

If the business is small, there's probably no need to invest in expensive archiving tools or outsourced services just yet. Basic email management tools and services are available through most Internet Service Providers (ISPs) - some archive email as a matter of course - and are also present in most common desktop messaging and storage applications.

Anne Taylor, product manager office systems for Microsoft New Zealand, says the full version of Microsoft's Outlook email client includes tools that let people set permissions on certain emails so they cannot be forwarded or printed, and assign "rights management" to attachments so only certain users can open and read documents or edit them.

She says few smaller businesses realise they can use their email client to schedule tasks or meetings according to emails received, or filter junk mail (spam) on high, medium and low settings. Email can also be exported from Outlook by right-clicking on specific email folders, saved as a PST file and stored in an "Archived Email" folder on a hard drive. Some businesses use removable media, usually a CD.

"Ideally, you need to be able to find a [stored] email again if you need it," says Taylor.

But while some emails are very important, most are general chatter and business communications like "thanks for that" - why then, does a business need to store and manage them all?

Elizabeth Leonard, knowledge management consultant for IT firm Infinity Solutions, says a business will manage and archive all its email for four main reasons: to protect staff from the effects of wrongful use of email; to prevent the loss of customer information sent or received by email; to meet international accounting and finance data storage standards around email; and to be able to use email in a legal case.

For the latter, Leonard says businesses must be able to prove an email has not been tampered with.

"You need technology placed at the [email] gateway that takes a snapshot of the true and original email as it comes into the organisation," says Leonard.

While Leonard can recall one instance where a public authority had to settle out of court because they couldn't provide evidence that an email had not been tampered with, she says most businesses "wear the risk" because the chances of a court case hanging on an email are low, and the costs of tamper-proof technology high.

What businesses more commonly can afford, and want, says Leonard, is email that can be managed and archived intelligently as well as used in a way that minimises the chances of a virus or other security breach. She says benefits include the possibility of complying with international finance and accounting standards.

"To be [standards] compliant carries positive connotations for global business and indicates a New Zealand business is [geared] to transact electronically on a global basis," says Leonard.

Businesses also need to draft sensible and enabling email policies for staff - "Thou shalt not" doesn't work for most people, says Leonard.