Classifying and Intelligently Archiving Email

Email has become as mission-critical as any other IT system. As a result, organizations are evaluating their overall policies and systems for managing email, and IT professionals are being called on to address the most common email management concerns, including resource management, retention management and discovery management.

Enterprises are evaluating or using email archiving software solutions to manage these issues. With these systems, IT can control the growth in email storage costs while giving end users email storage and search in a more user-friendly manner and providing legal departments a consistent system for retaining and finding emails. While these systems simplify the issues of archive storage size, archive retention period and archive search, they do not make them disappear.

Why not? Because not all email is created equal. Some email is an asset, while other email is a liability. And, the amount of time it should be retained depends upon the category into which the email falls. But organizations that use email archiving systems typically either: have no automated archiving system; archive but keep everything for the same period of time; or archive but keep everything forever.

There’s got to be a better way.

Enter "intelligent archiving." The natural evolution of early email archiving software solutions, intelligent archiving utilizes intelligent classification and retention technologies to capture, categorize, index and store target data to enforce policies and protect corporate assets—all while helping to reduce storage costs and simplify management.

Fundamental Policy Decisions Require Flexibility

Intelligent archiving solutions address one of the most fundamental challenges of email storage and discovery: data classification. Rather than treating all email the same, intelligent archiving offers intelligent classification and categorizes messages according to their relevance to specific business purposes. Only when data is appropriately classified can it then be intelligently filtered, retained and discovered.

Not only do different types of email messages have different values, but different companies have different classification needs for their information. For example, highly process-driven organizations such as insurance firms or mortgage companies may require much more granular classification than would a manufacturer or other business with more fluid interaction. Other companies may already have an enterprise content management (ECM) system in place and simply want to extend it to archived email.

Intelligent archiving accommodates these classification approaches, offering user classification that allows individuals to sort messages as part of archiving, automated classification that tags messages based on rules and integration with ECM systems that applies existing ECM policies to email messages.

User Classification

Many organizations must rely on their users to make difficult decisions about what email to save or delete. However, this often burdens them with too many processes and affects their productivity. For example, the user may be tasked with using a Web interface, saving an email to a specific folder, or using an application plug-in to specify metadata.

To help reduce the number of steps the user must take in classifying emails, intelligent archiving systems offer a seamless, intelligent user-driven classification model. This software monitors users’ email activity, identifies email that needs to be classified and prompts the user to choose from a subset of predefined classifications only when necessary.

By providing a policy-based email capturing process, the user classification engine enables all business-critical and regulated email to be sorted as each item is created or read by the user. This helps enforce user retention policies more effectively by taking control of records where they are most vulnerable.

Automated Classification

In contrast to user classification, automated classification takes decision-making out of the hands of users and puts it into the circuits of the archiving system. Today’s classification engines use a combination of approaches to analyze a message and determine what type of content it is.

For example, an automated classification engine may evaluate senders and recipients as well as the groups in which they reside to determine content type. It may also evaluate message direction since messages sent externally often merit a higher degree of scrutiny and retention. An automated engine may evaluate messages for keywords or phrases or for patterns, searching emails for sequences that identify Social Security numbers, for example, and so on.

The most robust intelligent archiving systems offer a wide variety of tagging rules based on customizable or predefined conditions. Flexibility is key because rules can be established on multiple levels. Tagging rules also