E-mailing archiving a nightmare?

Today, Jun 2003 by Ward, Janet

Industry expert answers commonly asked questions about e-mail storage

E-MAIL IS NOW THE DE-FACTO STANDARD FOR COMMUNICATION BETWEEN EMPLOYEES AND WITH MANY CORPORATE CUSTOMERS. MANY CORPORATE IT AND COMPLIANCE OFFICERS ARE NOW AWARE OF THE TREMENDOUS RISK AND LITIGATION EXPOSURE RELATED TO E-MAIL COMMUNICATION.

E-mail is now becoming one of the most popular discovery requests in corporate lawsuits. E-mail archival and retrieval should be a process that withstands legal scrutiny and audit similar to corporate paper records and other corporate electronic documents. Not complying properly may expose the corporation and its officer to legal consequences such as spoliation of evidence charges and/or adverse judgments.

Why not just save all e-mails on corporate e-mail servers by adding more storage and performing regular backups?

Backing up an e-mail server, at a given point in time, does not save all e-mails. If a backup is clone once a night, an e-mail that is sent and deleted during the same day will not be backed up. In addition, adding more storage leads to rising costs and increased retrieval difficulty and performance problems for mail servers. If the backups are done at the corporate mail server, they are backed up in a proprietary format and new releases of mail server software and changing mail server vendors will affect the ability to restore the e-mail. Imagine trying to retrieve all documents from a given employee for the past three years by loading all of their e-mail for every nightly backup tape set and then trying to distinguish new e-mails that arrived or were sent since the previous nightly backup!

Why not just write all e-mails to CD-ROMs in the IT department?

Having millions, billions, or even trillions of documents stored on CD is technically relatively easy to accomplish. But restoring and viewing a single e-mail or set of e-mails from or to a specific e-mail address or domain, across many years of data, can be nearly impossible.

What about compliance?

Industries regulated by the sec (Securities and Exchange Commission) include brokerages/securities, financial services, banking and insurance. SEC Regulation 17a-4 (June 1999) requires archival of all customer communications for a period of three years. This regulation includes e-mail, and most SEC-regulated firms interpret this to mean all corporate e-mail. In addition to SEC rulings, there are different regulations for each market, such as HIPAA, State Regulations, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, and Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999.

What is the best format for long-term storage of e-mail?

Since there are many different types of proprietary mail formats, and a customer may change vendors, upgrade their current mail vendor software, or have multiple mail vendors, it makes sense to store all e-mail in a common SMTP/MIME format. All major e-mail vendors (e.g. Lotus Notes, MS Exchange) support this format for mail being sent over the public Internet by using a SMTP gateway, which converts the proprietary mail format into a standard format.

What other options are there for the problems of storing and retrieving e-mails?

Anacomp offers a Web Presentment Service, a highly scalable, and secure way to ensure long-term storage with search and retrieval of e-mail documents.

What does the customer have to do to set this up?

There is no special software or servers to install or configure. Your e-mail administrator needs to configure the mail servers to forward all e-mail to a given e-mail address. This can be done by setting a forwarding rule, a bcc (blind copy) rule, or by instituting specific mail server scripts. For large volumes of e-mail traffic and security reasons, it may make sense to install a private communication line to the Web Presentment Data Center.

How would users look at the stored e-mails?

Using a standard Web browser, the user selects a set of e-mail, using an intuitive interface, by specifying a set of search criteria. Search results are available rapidly, and can be viewed online. When the required message is found, the original version-with all of its delivery information and attachments, can be viewed, printed or saved locally. Expert search allows for flexible search options such as being able to retrieve e-mails across specific date ranges, use wildcard character search to look for specific words within subject lines, or look for all e-mails from a specific domain (e.g. aol.com).

How fast can an archive system retrieve a document?

Generally, document retrieval time is measured in seconds. To obtain the fastest search response times, the associated indexes and e-mail document archives are placed on magnetic media and a relational database with tables, broken up by year or month, are used. The data can also be migrated to optical media to achieve compliance. Since this is a Web-based presentment application, the speed of presentment to the user is affected by the speed of their connection to the Internet. In general, the speed is comparable to traditional Internet search and display engines.