Email Archiving – What is it and why do I want it?

by Doug Hafford, Afinety+ Zine, Spring 2012

In the legal industry, there is a lot of confusion about what Email archiving really is, why a firm might want or need it, and how it works.  In this article, I will distinguish between the different types of archives and provide the information needed to make educated decisions on the options available in a law firm network.  We will start with some background on how things were handled in the past.
For years, users who have large mailboxes have resorted to the older standard .PST file to reduce the size of their mailbox with mixed levels of success.  This is a cumbersome process and can actually slow Outlook if the .PST files are being opened automatically.  Often users would do this on their own, which meant that these important archives were stored on the users’ local “C:” drive.  Thus, if the PC had an issue with its hard disk, the archive was irretrievably lost.  Some firms chose to move these archive files to a backed up location on a server, but this could cause even lower performance.  In short, this was a poor solution to a user who had reasons to keep significant amounts of email.
Many users have simply given up because the amount of mail they want access to is dauntingly large.  These are generally attorneys and they simply cannot give up the billable hours they generate by spending the time to organize, groom and generally maintain the massive amount of email.  Simply put, it continues to grow, along with their frustration since their Outlook performance is degrading day by day. 

In corporate America the concept of Email Bankruptcy has started to take root.  A person will send an email to all contacts declaring email bankruptcy.  The message says that if anyone is waiting for an answer, ask again because they have deleted all of their email and are starting over!

The new Microsoft Office 2010 when combined with Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 email system has an auto-archiving feature.  This is a great way to keep mailbox sizes groomed by automatically removing older emails and putting them into a centralized, searchable database.  The way this works is relatively simple.  Your Exchange Server allows a setting for how long an email can live in a user’s inbox.  When a mail item reaches that limit it is automatically placed in an archive for that user, accessible directly from Outlook.  The setting for an individual user can be overridden but the idea is to have a firm standard and enforce that standard at the server level. 

With this type of archiving, if a file is deleted from your inbox or from the archive, it is gone.  Only items that are desired are kept.  Thus, this is a grooming tool and not a discovery tool for the most part.  The only consideration is that an additional client license is necessary to accomplish this at about $40.00 per user.

The second type of archiving, discussed in previous articles, is full email archiving for all users.  In this case, all mail --incoming, outgoing and internal-- is automatically copied into a searchable data file.  Generally these archives have a lifetime of 10 years.  Cloud Services such as Mimecast offer this among other features and there are also internally maintained versions that require significant storage space, server functionality and maintenance.  Since all mail is archived, should a discovery situation arise, locating pertinent email data is simple and efficient.  However, does this actually encourage users to groom their mailbox?  In other words, if you know you can always go to this archive to retrieve something, are you more likely to delete an email once you have read it?  The jury is still out on this and we suspect it will be a matter of confidence that the archive does indeed have all the messages and that it is easy to use. 

The concern about cloud services that we hear from clients is always about security and the possibility of a subpoena reaching the data storage provider that the firm does not know about.  Fortunately most or all of these services observe a common standard which allows them to store data but not access it independent of the client.  Because of this, the data is safe and secure and any subpoena would have to be passed on to the client for response as the storage company has no access to the data.

We believe all firms should archive mail in both ways.  First the local archives should be used to keep email boxes small and performance high.  Users depend heavily on email and the performance of Outlook and should not be hampered by bad habits.  Second, cloud based archives allow the firm to locate any email they want at any time they want, and also make disaster recovery, failover and continuity possible.  These are essential parts of any business continuity plan.