Managing Email Overload: The Smart, Secure and Legal Way
The average size of email is also increasing. In the beginning, email communications were mostly text, without graphics, rich text, and, most importantly, without massive attachments. A few years ago, the average size of an email was less than 5 KB. A recent survey determined that 6% of email attachments are now 10 MB or larger, while approximately 3% are 50 MB or larger.
All of these factors have contributed to the explosive growth of email databases. Email server software was designed to manage the traffic and constant communication between users, but not to store those messages for long periods of time.
Some IT departments, in their continuing efforts to control the growth of email databases, have imposed quotas or limits on the storage per mailbox. Among other negative factors, this contributes to user frustration and lower productivity. Based on their quota limit, users must periodically "clean" their mailboxes by deleting or moving emails to personal folders (commonly to .PST files). Users have to dedicate part of their working time to manually managing their mailboxes. If they opt to delete the email, important corporate information and knowledge can be lost. Later, the same user could need that deleted email in order to complete his work, and might even ask the IT department to restore it from a backup (requiring more time and resources).
Organizations need solutions that allow users to have seamless access to their email without limiting the number or size of emails they can access from their mailboxes. On the other hand, database size should be minimized in order to facilitate upgrading to more reliable and faster email servers, while making administrative tasks such as database backups, mailbox maintenance and recovery procedures easier and faster.
Business-Critical Information
Email is increasingly recognized as a valid source of corporate information, and companies are looking for ways to manage it as they do other business-critical content. Industry analysts endorse this strategy, recommending that their corporate clients look for solutions that integrate email with other electronically stored information. This integrated approach enables retrieving all records related to a particularcustomer or transaction with a single query—purchase order, invoice, correspondence, email—and viewing them together.
The threads of a sequence of emails provide a more comprehensive picture of the information or tracking of transactions, conversations, decisions and negotiations than the attached individual documents such as quotations, purchase orders or invoices. This ability to "manage content in context" can deliver important benefits to the organization.
The new generation of email management solutions goes beyond earlier, more limited products that provided simple backup oroffloading of email stores, and products that left it to each user’s discretion to decide which messages to retain.
An effective solution addresses five primary requirements:
- Retain messages in compliance with regulations and corporate policies;
- Provide a highly scalable repository able to keep pace with email volume growth and long retention periods to aggregate billions of email messages;
- Facilitate searching as required for legal discovery;
- Improve system performance and reliability; and
- Integrate email with other corporate records and content.
Such a solution automatically captures, classifies and indexes email messages, creates a searchable archive and manages the information lifecycle according to corporate retention and disposition rules. Offloading email to secondary storage improves the efficiency of the email system while continuing to make the archive accessible to users, auditors and compliance officers.
A robust email management solution delivers important benefits to the organization. Without one, you will: spend more on administration; overloaded servers will degrade the performance of your email system; and users will be burdened with mailbox limits. Further, you will be subject to the risks of non-compliance and/or spend millions of dollars and countless hours combing through voluminous files to produce messages required for legal discovery and regulatory requests. Finally, important information that could be shared and leveraged to the benefit of the organization may be lost.
Since 1986, ASG has been using cooperative business practices and more than 200 leading software solutions to help companies around the world overcome everyday business challenges. ASG is headquartered in Naples, FL, with offices serving the Americas, Europe, Middle East, Africa and Asia Pacific. For more information, visit
www.asg.com or call 800-932-5536.