E-Mail: Why It's Next to Impossible to Lose

Archiving E-Mail

"Archiving solutions are just a means to track and manage the enormous amount of e-mail flowing around the world," says Keith McCall, CTO of managed e-mail provider Azaleos.

McCall says it is the retention policies that protect companies when the question of "lost' e-mail arises.

"You would be really surprised by the number of people that have purchased archiving software and do not have a retention policy," says McCall. "We advise every company to have an e-mail retention policy because in the case of litigation you can incur liability without an e-mail retention policy in place."

The Chicago law firm of Vedder, Price, Kaufman, & Kammholz estimates the cost to retrieve and review e-mail messages when they are requested for a lawsuit at US$2 per message.

Using that figure, the millions of lost or missing White House e-mails could end up costing taxpayers multimillions of dollars to find.

In the Osterman survey, Michael Osterman, president of the firm, concludes that "with the increasing importance of e-mail as a business communications tool, the fact that employees are conducting business through outside e-mail accounts leaves businesses with no formal e-mail record of those e-mail correspondence vulnerable to all sorts of risk. This underscores the tremendous importance for businesses to ensure they are covered with a strong e-mail archiving solution that stores, tracks and locates all of an organization's e-mail."