Consulting Journal: Trends - Email archiving

Trends: Email archiving

by David Blakey

Some professionals need to save and archive their email messages. Even if you don't need to, it's still a good idea.

[Monday 23 June 2003]

I wrote recently about recording messages that you send and receive using instant messenger (IM) services. You can view that article. While most consultants are not subject to the rules of the US Securities and Exchange Commission (the SEC), it is worth consultants taking note of the requirements imposed upon other professionals, such as lawyers, accountants and financial advisers. It would be reasonable to regard some of these requirements as ‘best practice’ for consultants.

As a result of that article, I have been asked about storing email messages. In this article, I shall try to answer the questions about storage.

Considerations

There are several factors to take into consideration before I can describe a method that will work for you

The major consideration is size. If you work for a large multinational consulting firm, the methods available to you will be different from the methods that are available to a single consultant, working mainly from home. We shall look at both these extremes first.

Large consulting firms

In a large multinational consulting firm, all email messages that pass through the central server can be saved and archived. Indeed, most major consulting firms have systems that perform these functions. You should note that I stated that this would apply to ‘all email messages that pass through the central server’. There are two new factors here.

First, all email messages that pass through the central server will be saved and archived. This includes all personal email messages. Inevitably, with any good relationship between a consultant and a client, there will be personal email messages among the business email messages, such as invitations to lunch. The centralized system will not differentiate between these, so they will all be saved and archived. If you do send personal email messages to people other than clients, then those messages will also be processed by the system.

Second, only email messages that pass through the central server will be saved and archived. Messages sent to a client from a consultant's home system or even from a laptop will not be included, unless arrangements are made either to copy them to the central server or to send them all through the central server in any case. This second rule would require all remote users to log on to the central server to send and retrieve email.

Solo consultants

For a single consultant the picture can be very different. There is unlikely to be any form of automated archive. Instead, the consultant may simply copy email messages to CDs or DVDs. There will also be no automated indexing of these archives. An important feature of archives is that they can be retrieved. It may be that the copies made by consultants do not allow individual email messages to be retrieved easily.

A solo consultant will also usually be able to edit a set of email messages, so that personal messages will not be archived.

At one end, then, we have large firms with their focused, indiscriminate systems; at the other, sole consultants with their disparate, selective methods. Many consulting firms will be somewhere between these two. In the worst instance, of a small consulting house with a number of consultants, there may be no central system at all and a number of individual methods of archiving. The quality of these methods may differ extensively.

Methods

These factors mean that there are several different methods that can be used. Some will work well for some organizations. A large multinational consulting firm, using a product such as Notes, can impose rules that all email messages will be sent and received through the Notes servers. They will be able to save, archive and retrieve all incoming and outgoing email messages.

Single consultants can save email messages in a form that allows them to be retrieved.

In between these two, many consulting firms will have to decide on the methods that will work best for them.

Print and file

There are some methods that are inadequate. Printing and then filing hard copies of email messages is one of them. At first sight, it may appear that printing an email message and then filing it under the client's name and assignment is an effective method. It ignores the fact that an email message contains more information than is shown on a simple print. Some of this information is about the originating server for the message. This information can be useful in proving when and by whom the message was sent. An email message is essentially insecure, because it passes through a number of servers on its way from the sender to the recipient. This insecurity can be an advantage in proving the provenance of an individual message, as its passage through an intermediate server may have been independently logged. If A denies sending a message to B, it may help that C - an independent third party - can verify that such a message passed through its servers.

Backup

It may appear that running a backup of the email client's files will provide a solution. Unfortunately, each email message can only be extracted from these files by the email client itself. This means that the files will have to be restored in their entirety before any single message can be isolated.

This can mean that the files in use at the time of the restore will be overwritten. This means that the messages within those files will be lost, which defeats the object. It is, of course, possible to backup the current files, restore the backup, and then subsequently the restore the current files. This is risky and complex.

Special software

The best answer is to use special software that will save each message completely and in a form that allows it to be retrieved individually and completely. The large firms - such as those using Notes - do not have a problem. These facilities are often built into the application as standard. Smaller firms - using email clients such as Outlook and Eudora - may have problems. This software is not usually included, even as a separately purchased add-on. If it is written specifically for the firm, it will depend upon the formats used in the email client program. These formats may change with new versions. They will certainly change if an email client is replaced by a rival product. None of the common email clients appears to use XML, which could make the task of building add-on software easier.

I am certain that using special software is the best answer. It does need the ongoing expense of checking each new release of the email client before releasing it and then deploying that release to every user.

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