Email Archiving, Email Hosting - SaaS

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.

Best practices in archiving: Blocking and tackling

Today is the first sunday of the NFL season! (I say that with uncontrollable enthusiasm)  And while many fans aspire to see their teams run flea-flickers, reverses and Statue of Liberty plays, most smart coaches know that it's important to start with the basics - blocking and tackling.

Martin Tuip on his Archiving101 blog has a great post about not losing sight of "blocking and tackling" when setting your archiving policies - or KISS, as Martin says.  As someone who's seen thousands of archiving customers over the years, Martin's thinking really resonated with me.

Many customers struggle with a desire to design a perfect system:

• Every message is automatically categorized.
• The system figures out what every message really "means."
• It never makes any mistakes.
• It requires no human intervention.
• It keeps everything only as long as necessary, and no longer.

They sit in committees and vendor pitches, waiting for the nirvana solution to emerge.  Meanwhile:

• Email storage continues to explode.
• Email backup windows grow every day.
• Users continue to create "underground" archives on their PCs.
• Backup tapes accumulate for legal holds and retention.
• IT is stuck restoring tapes and imaging PCs to respond to legal requests.
• Legal is unsure whether legal holds are really being enforced. 

In other words, companies wait to design the perfect play, but get stuck not moving the ball at all and having to punt it away.