Email Archiving, Email Hosting - SaaS

Boston Email Blunders Extend Beyond Mayor’s Office

State public records law? What state public records law? Apparently Boston city leaders didn't get the memo ... or at least they didn't let old habits die when improper email deleting practices first came to light.

Last month, I wrote about a key member of Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino's staff, Chief Policy Adviser Michael J. Kineavy, deleting emails without regard for state public records laws. The issue came to light when the Boston Globe requested copies of Kineavy's emails over a six-month period, which only returned 18 results. This led to the revelation that Kineavy deleted all of his email on a daily basis, without letting them be backed up, in direct violation of Massachusetts public records law.

But the saga continues ...

It turns out that many employees at Boston City Hall were deleting emails regularly - it was a common and seemingly acceptable practice for mailbox management. The problem is state public records law requires the city to preserve "all city email" for two years. Even more surprising, the Boston Globe discovered that a state judge warned Mayor Menino's administration that city employees were deleting email nearly a year ago, but no one did anything to stop it.

Now, Kineavy's computer is undergoing a forensic review, and who knows if city employees are still deleting emails. But I bet Mayor Menino wishes he had a seamless email archiving solution in place right about now.

Careful, Hitting “Delete” Doesn’t Always Mean It’s Gone for Good

I am constantly amazed that people, including public officials, still think they can completely delete things they send via email. Although you may delete email from your possession, you have no control over the recipients of those messages - or the recipients they may forward your messages to, and so on. Your company - or government entity, as the case may be - could very well have an email archiving solution in place that is automatic and seamless, and you may or may not know about it. The recipients' organizations are likely archiving as well. One thing is for sure: There is always a trail.

Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino is finding out the hard way that deleting email is not a best practice. Two local city councilors and challengers of Menino in an upcoming Democratic preliminary election are asking the local attorney general and district attorney to investigate the routine deletion of emails by officials in Menino's administration, including those sent and received by one of his closest advisors, Michael J. Kineavy.

The controversy arose when the Boston Globe requested copies of Kineavy's email communications over a six-month period. The search returned only 18 results. The unusually low volume of email led to questioning by city officials and an admission by Kineavy that he doesn't allow his email to be backed up and deletes all of it on a daily basis, which violates state public records law.

The result of this investigation is yet to be determined, but whether or not an archiving solution was in place, chances are that some of those emails will turn up somewhere. An email archiving solution is a really great insurance policy for any organization, public or private, that may become the subject of an investigation or lawsuit - and it saves a lot of time and money in instances like the one brewing in Boston.

This isn't the first time we've seen a case like this, and unfortunately, it's probably not going to be the last. The bottom line? If you're trying to hide something, it will inevitably catch up with you, thanks to technology and the age of electronic communications.

Backing Up vs. Archiving: What’s the Diff?

We get this question a lot from IT folks who have faithfully backing up their email for years.  First off, we are not suggesting you stop backing-up.  Far from it. 

Backing up your company data is important from a disaster recovery perspective.  A nice short-term insurance policy. Meaning that should your primary messaging environment (e.g., Exchange) collapse or fall victim to some type of natural or manmade disaster, you will have a copy of it stored safely offsite. 

That's obviously a good thang.

The trouble is some IT folks mistakenly believe that their back-up can also meet their email compliance or legal discovery needs.  But, think about it.  Let's say your company gets sued and the opposing council asks for an email thread involving Amy, your wayward manager prone to fits of rage, and her ex-employee, John, whom she summarily fired three years ago.

If you relied on back-up tapes, you would have to do the following:

1. Search for the old tapes (assuming you hadn't overwritten them)
2. Hope that you could restore the tape (assuming it wasn't corrupted after three years sitting in storage)
3. Try to find the relevant emails related to the case

Since people backup email servers every day, week and month, you don't end up having to restore one tape but often many.  For example, if you backup every day and want all email for a year, it could be 365 tapes.  And once you have all those tapes, you have to de-duplicate because you'll have tons of redundant data.  So, the process of restoring could literally take you weeks if not months

Another pitfall of backup is that you don't end up capturing ALL emails (e.g., data that was created and deleted in same day) because backups often happen just once a day and tapes often miss data sitting in people's laptops (e.g., PST files).

And there's a better than average chance that after all of this, you still won't be able to find the needle in the haystack.  This could cost you big time if the jury thinks you're trying to squash damaging evidence.

Now, let's compare that with an email archiving solution.  What's the difference?

First off, when you archive every email they get indexed and stored in the archive in real-time.  Because they have been indexed, it's easy to find an email based on the sender, the date range, subject line or even keywords in the email body or attachment with just a few clicks.  And perhaps, in the process, you may find that Amy actually had legal grounds to terminate John.

But, there are a few other benefits of archiving that you get as a bonus.

One. By having an email archive, you can reduce the size of your email storage since you can now safely "prune" these stores knowing that they have been securely archived.  Plus, you can now safely reduce the mailbox sizes allocated to your end users.

Two. By pruning your email stores, you can significantly shorten your backup windows (the time it takes to back up all of your email). 

And three. With many archiving solutions, you can even give your end users direct access to their own historical email.  Translation - they can restore their own email in seconds without having to involve YOU!  And in so doing, you can eliminate PSTs (personal email folders typically stored on their desktops) which can be missed during legal discovery and are prone to accidental loss.

Consequently, email archiving allows Exchange administrators to get a handle on some of their most common pains, including exploding email volumes and the daily challenges of backups.  We encourage you to learn more about these differences in our Archiving vs. Backing Up white paper.