E-mail Archiving Stupidity
I live in the Dallas area, but not in the city of Dallas. That means my children were outside the horribly mis-managed Dallas schools, but we're still under the thumbs of idiotic Dallas County officials. How idiotic? How about this recent story, “E-mail Deletion Plan Criticized,” about officials wanting to delete e-mail after 90 days. Have none of them heard of all the new regulations about e-mail archiving?
Of course, the current Republican governor of Texas convinced the Texas Attorney General to rule that he could delete e-mails after a week (hiding anything, gov?). By this measurement, it appears that the bozos in Dallas County are 12 times smarter than those in the Governor's office. That's a hard contest to judge. And as comedian Ron White says, “you can't fix stupid.”
Let me make this as clear as possible: keep your e-mails for years. Keep them forever if you can. This will only help, unless you and your coworkers are actively planning criminal acts via e-mail. If so, start meeting in the halls to plan criminal acts, and don't write down anything in e-mail. Then keep those newly-clean e-mails forever.
When some unhappy customer or former business partner sues you, the more evidence you have of your innocence the better. Hence the need for an e-mail archive. Before a lawsuit happens, reasonable offers are made by both sides which the other side rejects for some reason, usually a stupid reason driven by hurt feelings. When you bring those “let's make peace” e-mails to court, you win your case almost every time.
Besides the other smart reasons to keep e-mail, such as all the information about your business processes, customers, and solved problems therein, the laws demanding e-mail archiving are expanding to cover more industries each month. If you plan your e-mail archive solution at your pace, you'll get a better and cheaper system than if you panic and rush to throw a system together once your business becomes regulated.
E-mail archiving is now relatively cheap and remains a good idea. Mining the business value of e-mails is an even better idea.
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Archive everything forever is not always the right advice
Hi James,For many types of corporate documents the laws and regulations are not specific with respect to retention periods. As such, the value of keeping those documents beyond their immediate use is questionable.
Two important cases underscore this reality:
In Zubulake v. UBS Warburg it was held that “A corporation need not preserve every shred of paper, every e-mail or electronic document, and every backup tape.” While in Wiginton v. Ellis the court said that “[T]o hold that a corporation is under a duty to preserve all e-mail potentially relevant to any future litigation would be tantamount to holding that the corporation must preserve all e-mail...Such a proposition is not justified.”
So I don't agree it's the right advice for all firms to archive everything all the time. For a while, archive everything appeared to be the only approach to reducing risk of sanctions. But according to many practitioners, advances in search, categorization and document management technology hold promise to alter the archive everything mindset. Leading organizations are looking to a model that is more targeted and ensures that the right documents are kept for the right amount of time. The key is that documents which have reached their end of life are fully and defensibly deleted and that organizations can demonstrate processes and policies that will be deemed credible by a court.
CIOs need to balance cost, risk and information value. I'm not saying that task is trivial but the storage hardware and archive software vendors need a better answer for users than keep everything forever. It's too expensive, especially in these tight times. -Dave from Wikibon.org