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.

Abracadabra – Emails Begone!

We've come to the point in which it's no longer a surprise when emails just magically vanish from their respective environment. As reported by The News & Observer here, this has happened yet again as James Oblinger, the former chancellor of N.C. State University, had lost six months of high-priority correspondence. These emails have recently become relevant to litigation pertaining to how Oblinger allegedly helped to create a job for First Lady Mary Easley that involved an 88 percent pay increase in one year.

John Woodward, the university's interim chancellor, takes the stance that the university's retention policy calls for the emails to be deleted and that the data wasn't manually removed. N.C. State is now bringing in forensic technicians to determine whether or not any of the data can be recovered.

I'd say that this is all the more reason to have an archiving solution in place while maintaining appropriate retention policies. Granted, if you're in a regulated industry you're generally only required to keep your email for a certain length of time. But would it really hurt to cover all of your bases by keeping it longer? If you've got nothing to hide, you're only protecting yourself and potentially eliminating concerns stressed by potential accusers.

After all, wasn't it just a week ago that I blogged about a similar topic? Raise your hand if you're beginning to tire of emails that vanish faster than David Copperfield. At least in this case, Oblinger didn't opt for the Tyrell S. Drew hand drill method.

Exchange backups: Groundhog Day?

Do you remember Groundhog Day?  It was the 1993 Bill Murray film about a guy who relives a day of his life over and over again.  It featured the classic line:

This is one time where television really fails to capture the true excitement of a large squirrel predicting the weather. 

In any case, I think the way we stick to the weekly tradition of full Exchange tape backups is like a bad recurring dream.  Lots of the same stuff over and over again.

Today, I spoke with the blogger and former storage CTO George Crump who had a great post on his blog, Storage Switzerland, about how full backups are becoming a thing of the past in general.

I think this is particularly true for email, where users and lawyers want and demand the granularity of a message - not the granularity of a tape.

Many clients backup Exchange every day with incremental backups and innovative disk-to-disk technologies and yet still perform full backups to retain data for legal discovery or data retention purposes.

If all of your data is in a hosted archive, full Exchange backups and retaining tapes for long periods of time become something admins can cross off of their ever-growing to-do list.  This saves tape media, tape storage and precious IT time.

So they can move on to the next day.