Guest Blogging at Archiving 101

I'm guest blogging over at Archiving 101. Jump on over to view some of my thoughts on the need for proactive email categorization.

This will be a two part series: look for a follow on article next week. Read more...

Non-business email messages are not public records in Florida

At least for the State of Florida.

Follow the jump for an interesting opinion on the question of whether non-business email constitutes a public record.

The opinion Makes the following assertions:

..."official business communicated by e-mail transmissions is a matter of public record." In re: Amendments to Rule of Judicial Administration 2.051 -- Public Access to Judicial Records, 651 So. 2d 1185 (Fla. 1995). However, the court has also recognized that e-mail messages may include transmissions that are not official business and which, consequently, are not public records." id. at 1187. Thus, the Supreme Court has already given us some guidance in this area. Non-business e-mail messages are not public records and need not be retained.

...

Experience in our office indicates that many e-mail messages consist of one or two lines dashed off electronically because, at any given time, it may be the most expedient means of communicating a simple message: "your meeting is at 2:00, don't be late"; "remember to order a new copier cartridge this afternoon"; "please let me know when you will have the project finished." These communications are the electronic equivalent of communications that under different circumstances would take place verbally -- either by telephone or directly.

It seems that there is a prevailing legal mantra, "save everything". Including every joke of the day, every email from social networking sites, every chain letter, every everything.

I'd like to suggest that it is possible to manage your archive with a little less extreme-ness. There are definitely items that can be safely removed: do you really need the 65,000 low toner notices?

I think it is time to really discuss what constitutes a business email. What are your thoughts?
Read more...

E-Discovery Searches are Inadequate

Many e-discovery efforts focus on two things: date range searches and searches for email addresses. I'd like to suggest that these are inadequate, and what you can do to really find the messages you're looking for.

The main problem with searching addresses is that they are not normalized. They come in myriad formats:

• bradleyy@example.com


• young.bradley@example.com


• </O=EXAMPLE/OU=SERVICES/CN=RECIPIENTS/CN=BRADLEYY>

These are just examples-- there are others. The point is that these all refer to the same user. On the other hand, you might end up with different users sharing the same address (which Joe Smith were we referring to during the three year period covered by the e-discovery?).

Dates in email are really completely random, unless you are referring to dates in the received lines. Alternately, you could keep metainformation about the email, i.e. the date that it was delivered to the journal, etc.

Emails need to have the current contextual information applied at the time of archive insertion. At a minimum, I would suggest looking at inserting unique identifier for the user (something like an employee id), what department the user is in, whether the user is an executive, whether the email contains potentially proprietary information, and whether the email is potentially privileged.

It would also be a good time to set retention policies and flag non-business mail, but that's a discussion for another day.
Read more...

Schadenfreude and Bacn

Schadenfreude is one of my favorite words, precisely because of the almost universal reaction received upon defining it. "There is a word for that?!", is the incredulous refrain.

Now there's a new term making the rounds of the noosphere, and it is bacn.

Bacn is the term for mail that isn't spam, isn't personal email, and isn't business email, either. Think about the newsletters you get from companies you purchase from, automated notices from internal systems, etc.

The reason I find this term interesting is that it is something I've been talking about for some time, but just never had a good word (words are power!) to properly describe it quickly. Even though it has "hip", "Web 2.0", "look I dropped a vowel, how creative I am!"-ness to it, I suspect it is going to make it into the common lexicon.

Here's why:

• It talks about a productivity problem with email.
  The modern information professional has 10-30% of their email composed of these types of email (newsletters, automated notices, your order has shipped), and every interruption to check email takes 15 minutes to properly resume from.


• It talks about an infrastructure problem.
  These emails are going in the archive. 10-20% of the emails in an email archive are bacn. They are especially likely to be saved by users, because, "I want to read them, just not right now."


• There are tools to help deal with it.
  Here at MessageGate, we use our software to automatically tag email as bacn, and the end user can set up rules to file these emails appropriately. A more intensive approach could auto-file these mails for the user (without them setting up rules).


• The volume of email involved has a very negative impact on e-discovery efforts, especially since the current (broken) methodology of searching by address and date has basically no false-positive filtering.

Companies are starting to look at the productivity and infrastructure burden of bacn; I'm just glad to have a word to describe a topic I've been working on and thinking about. Read more...

Help! My archive is out of control!

One of the great things about email archives is that they keep everything. One of the worst things about email archives is that they keep everything. When I say everything, I mean that you're literally paying (in storage, management, and software costs) for every spam, every picture of Johnny's 4th birthday party, every inappropriate email, every humorous "video du jour" that arrives at the mailbox.

Better yet, when push comes to shove, and an e-discovery event happens, you'll be paying a lawyer or paralegal to inspect these.

What should companies be doing about archives? I can certainly understand the "keep everything" mantra, but I'd like to suggest that there might be a method to keep everything that is necessary and important, while cleaning some of the non-business email from the archive.

First, try to get rid of as much spam as possible. Implement defense in depth: multiple spam solutions with different approaches (reputation services, content analysis, and something that analyzes fraudulent headers are all important) will help eliminate that extra several percent of spam that is currently getting to the mailbox. Five to ten percent of the email in most networks is spam (and that's after the spam filter).

Second, make decisions about what types of media are necessary to your business. Some examples: MP3 (music), Windows Media (video), and MPEG (video) aren't typically business critical files. If they aren't necessary, consider blocking them.

It is helpful if you have the ability to whitelist certain users or provide policies based on job description or department. We have implemented this with great success.

Third, if you allow users to take documents or files home for work purposes, consider encouraging the use of either flash drives or a remotely accessible content management system (e.g. Sharepoint). This has two benefits: it promotes better archive hygiene, and helps prevent information leakage.

Most of the information leakage we see is accidental-- mis-addressed email is probably the leading culprit for confidential information leaving most organizations.

Finally, educate your users. Establish an Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) for email, and specify the appropriate and inappropriate use of email. Establish etiquette guidelines-- many people have no idea what is appropriate in email, especially with Generation Y entering the workforce. They have had their formative years of electronic communication in an entirely personal context, whereas us "old folks" have, generally, had a more business-oriented introduction.

Following these suggestions could cut 20-30% off the size of your archive, without any impact with regards to actual day-to-day business email. Read more...

Analyzing archives

I read a lot of email.

Ok, technically, I analyze a lot of email. One of the services that we perform for our customers is an email audit.

Follow the link for some statistics on archive volumes under typical usage patterns.

The number of messages sent and received varies widely-- the average user sends between 147 and 198 emails per month and receives between 145 and 185 emails per month.

By direction, 70% is internal, and the remaining 30% is pretty evenly split between inbound and outbound mail.

Roughly 25% of email is non-business (i.e. spam that made it past the filter, private communication, external newsletters, etc.).

Most companies have an average email size of 50-60KB. There are two reasons for this:

1) HTML/RTF email cause small messages (that could have been 1KB) to be much larger (3-10x). This drives up the baseline.
2) You may have noticed this: there are a couple of Office documents floating around your email network.

Point 2) bears further consideration: 30-50% of the email (by volume) in a typical organization is Office documents (in which I include PDF files).

This causes the following storage analysis:

1000 users * 300 emails per month * 12 months * 60KB = annual storage burden of 206 GB, on average, per thousand users. That would be 2 TB per 10,000 users (per year).

Your mileage may vary, of course. Read more...