As an attorney, I favor the idea of an enterprise email archive system. From a legal discovery context, an effective email archiving system should lower the overall risk of spoliation and reduce the time spent on discovery. This is due in part to the email archiving system’s ability to provide messaging index, its audit and de-duplication capabilities and its protection from spoliation of all email messages stored within the archive.

From a litigation perspective, the ability to quickly search all historical email is critical. In my opinion, an ideal email archive would make it easy to search selected mailboxes or the entire environment using any search criteria in addition to performing sub-second searches across headers, body, subject, file names, and all known attachment types. In addition to all of these features, an email archive system should ensure a history of the email exists to prove its authenticity for chain of custody purposes. Without successful authentication, your “conclusive” email may not be admissible in court.

Most cases involve seemingly endless document review. Anyone who has worked on a legal case knows that reviewing documentation for privilege or relevance is both time consuming and expensive. An ideal email archive would substantially reduce the time spent reviewing emails by providing powerful filter capabilities. This would enable review teams to reduce responsive emails by using search criteria rather than filtering manually. My ideal email archive system would provide effective filtering capabilities which ultimately should reduce the amount of email that needs to be reviewed resulting in faster classification. Speaking of which, an ideal email archive would also possess robust auto-classification capabilities.

Another nice feature I would like to see included in an ideal email archive system is the capability for companies to set retention policies and Legal Holds of any length, by user, group or server, and allow them to be changed at any time to provide complete retention policy management. This would be extremely beneficial in the prevention of spoliation. Also from a compliance perspective, email records would be stored in the archive according to administrator defined retention policies. Is your company storing too much unnecessary and potentially non-relevant email? An email archive system can solve that problem. When retention periods expire, the email would be automatically deleted by the archiving application.

What if a company elects not to use an email archive system? Unfortunately, I know from personal experience that without email archiving, email exists on some combination of backup tapes and on end users’ local workstations. It is not unheard of for the outcome of a legal case to be contingent upon finding one email, the proverbial “smoking gun”. If a specific email needs to be found for an internal investigation or in response to litigation, it may take weeks to find and cost a huge sum of money. Faced with today’s challenging legal discovery rules and onerous compliance legislations, it is necessary for IT departments to centrally manage and archive their organization’s email and avoid those long, costly and unnecessary delays which frequently occur when searching for relevant email.