Every business has faced the question of what to with old emails. There are three options: keep them all, keep some of them, or delete them all. “Keep some” seems to be the right answer at first blush, but read the discussion below and see if you change your mind.
Delete All: Since email is between two parties, there are always two copies: the sender’s and the receiver’s. So, if you delete yours, the other party still has their copy. That could be a problem if you need that information later. After all, you don’t always know what information you’ll need in the future. Litigation or other legal situations may necessitate finding all the emails that relate to a particular topic. Regulated industries often require that you keep all documents – for 6 to 21 years depending on the industry. If you don’t keep them, you expose your organization to risk and liability.
Keep Some: This sounds like a good idea in principle, but how do you sort through and decide which to keep and which to delete? Manually or automatically? The average person receives 30 emails a day. It’s likely that no one in your company has the time to sift through all of those emails and determine which need to be kept. Not to mention that you may not feel that sorting through emails is the best use of your staff’s time – or your payroll dollars.
Sorting the emails automatically sounds like a viable alternative. Some programs are good at sorting structured documents by type or topic. But, emails are unstructured documents. For example, how would it sort this email? “Hi Bill, good to see you last week. I hope Eileen's got over that kidney infection and she's out of hospital. I've attached the report on that customer steering column failure. I don't think it's too much to worry about, but we should get the team together and talk about it. Let me take you to lunch next week - my treat!”
That email contains personal data, sensitive personal data because it is medical. It also contains product liability data which needs to be kept for ten years after the last product comes off the production line. How would you sort that email? Anyone?
“Because email is such a specialized kind of document, there is no reliable method for sorting it – and no way to be sure that you are complying with your industry’s regulations,” says Robin Bingeman, Product Manager of Forensic & Compliance Systems, the makers of the Cryoserver solution. “So, the only viable option is to save everything.”
Save Everything: If you save everything, you can do so automatically with Cryoserver’s Email Archiving Software
– and without needing to train your employees or worrying that they’re filing something in the wrong place. You simply pick the amount of time you want to save the emails for – such as 13 years – and Cryoserver does the rest.
When we discuss this option with clients, we usually get the same two questions about the Cryoserver system. 1.) Is it legal? Absolutely, as a company you are allowed to archive your emails for as long as you want. 2.) How expensive is it? The cost is far more reasonable than many people assume. It can be as low as $1 per user per year – a lot cheaper than paying your employees to sort their emails.
Like a “black box” airplane data recorder, the Cryoserver Email Archiving Appliance can be delivered as sealed appliance providing a complete, audited, tamper-evident repository of emails and instant messages sent to, from and around an organization, suitable for legal and regulatory compliance. Or, it can take the form of a software package which provides the same functions.
In the case of disputes or compliance requests, you will save time and money by searching through emails archived by Cryoserver – rather than looking for them on a backup tape. Plus, you can control access to the archived emails so you can limit the investigating employee’s search and prevent it from straying into irrelevant, and potentially sensitive, areas.
In a world where you need to save all your emails, the Cryoserver’s Email Archiving Software truly is the best solution.
