Building A Solid Safety Net For E-mail Content And Records — Email Archiving And Records Management Working Together

The increasing number of cross-industry regulations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 and industry-specific regulations such as those from the FDA, the SEC and HIPPA, coupled with enterprises' fear of non-compliance, has created an unprecedented focus on effective enterprise content and records management. Effective email content and records management is one of the most pressing issues in this initiative.

There is no doubt that emails are a form of electronic documents and as such, are business records that contain important business information. Starting with the Watergate hearings, most courts have accepted electronic documents as legal records akin to signed paper documents. And this position has only strengthened over time. Virtually every legal action today includes requests for all related emails as a standard practice (In many cases, the only legal proof has been within emails). Given the great number of legal precedents, in which an email has a legal status comparable to any other form of written correspondence - it must be managed with the same integrity, authentication and retention schedule as an equivalent paper document. This also means that the lifecycle of the email must be managed based on legal requirements, not at the whim of the sender or recipient of the email. The DoD 5015.2 Standard for Records Management states that "[Organizations] shall treat email messages the same as any other record, and these shall be subject to all requirements of this Standard."