Technologies for managing e-mail.

• Author: Wilkins, Jesse

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Advances in electronic messaging technology are radically changing the way people collaborate, and organizations must understand the business and legal implications of that. They must also develop and implement an electronic messaging program, which includes implementing the appropriate technology solutions to gain control of the e-message maelstrom and to be prepared for the possibility of litigation and e-discovery. (See sidebar "E-Message Management Program Requirements" on p. 4.)

E-Mail Technologies

Among a number of technologies that can be used to manage e-mail more effectively are standalone solutions that provide capabilities to address a very narrow concern, such as virus detection, and others that provide a broad spectrum of functionality. These technologies can be broadly grouped into six categories according to the type of capabilities provided.

Messaging Applications

This refers to the e-mail server environment. The most common messaging applications today include Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Domino, Novell Groupwise, Sun Java Messaging Service, and Sendmail. Messaging applications are very good at what they are designed to do, which is sending and receiving messages. However, they are not very good for long-term storage, records management, compliance, or discovery for these reasons:

* Messages are stored by user inbox and can be difficult for other users to access.

* They are not designed to manage the burgeoning volume of e-mail over time; the greater the volume in the message store, the slower the performance and the more likely the system will encounter stability issues.

* They typically do not provide litigation hold capabilities; when they do, it is often placed on the entire inbox or even the entire message store.

Archiving Solutions

For most organizations, e-mail management means e-mail archiving. E-mail archiving solutions copy or remove messages from the messaging application to another location, often a separate repository. Messages are selected for archiving according to defined rules, which may be based on the age of the message, its size, whether it has attachments, who sent or received it, or message content.

Eric Lundgren, Vice President Product Management at CA, a worldwide solution provider for information governance, including federated records management and e-mail archiving, describes e-mail this way: "It is part of a vast sea of transient data. Organizations need to apply the net of information governance to capture the important data, while letting the transient data go free."

Messages placed in the repository may be indexed to provide faster search and retrieval; some systems will index attachments as well. Many archiving solutions also provide de-duplication and single-instance storage of messages, which can greatly reduce the amount of storage required and make retention and disposition much easier. Finally, many of these solutions also provide tamperproof storage at the message or archive level to ensure the trustworthiness and reliability of the messages therein.

The capabilities and deployment model for e-mail archiving solutions depend on whether the solution moves or copies messages.

* Message moving solutions remove the archived messages from the message store and place them in a separate archive, generally to improve performance of the messaging application. Individual messages may be replaced with stubs, which are simply metadata and links to the messages in the repository. The users may not even know that the messages have been moved.

* Message copying does not remove messages from the message store, but instead makes a copy of every message sent or received and stores that copy in the repository. These solutions make it easy to ensure that all relevant messages are captured; however, this approach also means that many messages that are transitory or have no real business value will be captured and stored.

One of the significant challenges with message archiving is that it doesn't necessarily reduce the total amount of e-mail present in the organization--it just stores it in a central repository. Discovery costs can still be significant because the volume of messages to be reviewed remains high.

Scott Burt, CEO of Integro, a company that specializes in enterprise content management consulting and training, put it this way, "Journaling terabytes of e-mail still results in a haystack with terabytes of e-mail in it. How do you find a few hundred needles (relevant messages) in terabytes of haystacks? Keep fewer needles and keep them neatly arranged rather that throwing them all in the barn."

Anne Tulek, President of Access Sciences Corp., an information management and technology consulting firm, adds, "Some success is emerging where concerted efforts are focused on reducing the size of the haystack by employing e-mail zones. These allow users a simplistic three-zone, drag-and-drop-into-folders model as a means for applying archival rules to e-mail based on the user's understanding of the content. Although these approaches are showing early benefit, they will likely require more and improved autoclassification capabilities in the future to be sustainable."

Management Solutions

These solutions focus on the functionality required to enforce the requirements of the e-mail or communications policy. For example, the solution could be used to set up...