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by 350.org

Email Management Policies and Why Businesses Need One

Email management could be a company’s saving grace in today’s world of litigation and information overload. Email is now one of the most used communication systems around, over which important business decisions are often made, therefore an adequate email management system is vital to any business.

Managing one’s emails effectively could result in a much more productive work environment in terms of organization and timeliness, as well as helping with audit purposes. Furthermore, recent legislation has made it mandatory that all businesses and organizations need to be able to produce any documentation requested by the courts if legal issues arise.

Email Archiving as part of email management

Email archiving is one of the first steps to a successful email management program. Administrators can maintain an archive of all the company’s email correspondence which will be easily searchable and recoverable, and therefore reduce the dependence on PST files that can easily get corrupted and are not secure backups of email data.

Moreover, in order to comply with eDiscovery requests, email archiving is a must, whilst being able to access archived emails and corporate data in a matter of seconds can help realize a return on investment and therefore boost the company’s productivity.

Legislation and Regulations

Apart from the legal benefits that an email management policy presents, it is also important when dealing with inter-company issues such as harassment or dismissal charges, where critical information may have been recorded via email.

If an employee used his work email account for illicit purposes, verifying such a fact could prove to be a difficult task without an adequate email archiving system.

Email management from a legal perspective requires organizations to keep records of email documentation for a minimum period of up to five years. Such legislation includes the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) which affects all industries and imposes severe penalties on anyone who deliberately alters or deletes documents with the intent to defraud third parties.

Even though it is a US law, SOX act is also applicable to European companies with US listings as well as to companies that do business with the US. There are other legislations that also require companies and organizations to archive emails, as well as government bodies that comply with the regulations set by the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), the Patriot Act, National Archive Records Administration (NARA) and other legislative entities.

Storage & Knowledge Issues with Email Management

Managing one’s emails is not only a legal and compliance issue but also delves into the fields of storage and knowledge management. There has been a dramatic increase in storage size due to the increase in email usage over the years as well as the upsurge in attachments sent with original emails.

This increase has affected the efficiency, reliability and speed of message servers. An efficient email archiving solution stores emails in a compressed format, resulting in considerable disk space savings and centralizes your email records.

Furthermore, emails are automatically archived as soon as they pass through the message store, thus users can clean up their mailboxes without the worry of losing important emails. Additionally, an email archiving solution that allows authorized users to view emails from a central repository will encourage them to do so without having bulky PST files stored locally.

Large volumes of email correspondence, increased storage limitations, government regulations and potential legal implications have made the need for an email management policy a critical issue for any company. Managing emails through archiving allows organizations to have control over employees’ email accounts whilst ensuring regulatory and corporate compliance.

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by ChiefTech

Email Management Helps Tame Email Overload

You’re in good company if, like other firms with no email management strategy, your employees are complaining they’re being overwhelmed by email. The convenience of email is quickly being lost in the time spent reading, responding to and managing it.

There are three important reasons to get your company’s email overload under control. Let’s examine how compliance, employee efficiency and electronic discovery are compromised by an unruly email management system. 

Compromised Compliance

If your employees regularly receive email with legal documents attached having a structured electronic content management (ECM) system is crucial. This would ensure that your emails related to documenting commitments and obligations are recorded, complete and easily retrievable.

Ask yourself these questions: “Do my employees always document receipt of business-critical documents by email?” and “What kind of legal documentation is received that isn’t being stored in a way that allows access by others?”

If you’re unsure of the answers to those questions, your company’s compliance with contractual and regulatory requirements could be at risk. Contracts received but not documented, changes made to legal documents but not tracked or saved in a centralized document management system are just two of the problems that arise when email remains unmanaged.

Compromised Employee Efficiency

Recent studies show that workers at major companies are spending at least one hour, and many of them up to three hours, every day reading, responding to and trying to manually manage email. Overflowing in-boxes keep employees chained to their in-box and away from their primary job duties.

Capturing, sorting, storing and retrieving email messages and attachments manually and not having  an automated record retention and email destruction schedule are some of the ways efficiency is compromised .

To get a picture of what email handling is costing you in terms of employee efficiency, multiply your total number of employees who receive email by one hour. That’s the minimum number of man hours per day you’re probably losing to inefficient email management.

Compromised Electronic Discovery

Electronic legal discovery is often necessary when litigation is filed by or against your company. It’s the process of retrieving and examining electronic records for information relevant to legal action or compliance reviews.

Being able to retrieve electronic documents and messages quickly is vital to a strong legal defense or compliance strategy, and mandated by law. Surprisingly, many companies still do not have a formal system for archiving employee email in a way that makes that retrieval straightforward.

Even worse, many companies have no written policies about when employee email can be deleted. You may find yourself forced to explain that critical messages were deleted by employees because no email retention policy was in place.

Additional Security

Security is always enhanced when email automation is implemented. Automated encryption and other critical security measures are built into the data capture and storage process. Centralized email storage, as opposed to local machine storage, reduces the possibility of a security breach. Automating the retention and destruction schedules for email throughout your organization removes the human factor and insures uniform compliance with your firm’s email policies.

An Affordable Solution

One or more of these roadblocks to efficient operation may already be affecting your company if it has no formal email management system in place. You may, however, have delayed implementing electronic content management due to concerns about cost, digital storage space and IT staffing requirements.

Fortunately, today’s sophisticated email management systems are within reach of most organizations. Because this type of system can be part of a full-featured document management system, it requires no additional IT staffing or hardware outlay. It is also easy to use and economical to implement.

You can actually realize significant savings through increased employee efficiency brought about by automated management and fast retrieval of documents and emails.  Having the ability to access this information off-site via a secure web–based document management repository further improves efficiency and minimizes costs.

A well-designed ECM system enhances security, increases employee efficiency and allows timely compliance with regulations and electronic discovery requests. If your employees are buried by email overload, it’s time to introduce centralized email management as part of a document management strategy at your firm. The efficiencies you’ll realize will have you wondering why you waited so long.

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