As a bit of background, our company has been resistant to any form of
electronic document management -- mostly, because, as a small company,
the bigwigs don't think we can afford anything and secondarily, because
most of the upper management are just not comfortable with dealing with
e-records. They want everything on paper. However, due to some recent
shortcomings of that mindset, we are beginning to look at managing our
email electronically.
 
In looking at a few email management systems, it seems that are two
camps: 1) Manual capture by the sender/recipient or 2) automatic capture
at the server. Our IT people are leaning toward automatic capture, I
think largely because they know (and I agree) that trying to train
employees to manually manage their emails would be a disaster here. We
could take an easy route and just go for a system that will capture
everything and make it searchable, but IT understands and wants to treat
emails as a business record based on content (I have wonderful IT
guys!). Of course I'm hoping that this will open the door for a full
EDMS system down the line. But I digress ...
 
Automatic capture systems seem to fall into two models: 1) Configured
rules to sort and "file" emails or 2) a system that "learns" the content
of the emails and sorts them according to what it has learned (I'm shaky
on this concept since I have only heard of the process but have not seen
an actual demonstration of it).
 
We are leaning toward using the email management functionality of my
present file indexing system, which uses model #1. However, management
wants to at least understand all options before making a decision.
 
My questions: 
 
1) What are your experiences with any of these types of systems (manual
capture, rules capture, fully automatic capture)?
 
2) For those that use rules, what process did you use to analyze your
emails to come up with the rules? 
 
2a) What types of rules do you use? Are they based on content/keywords
or based on senders and/or recipients (e.g. if it goes to person A, then
put it here)?
 
As an aside, our "policy" is to print and file any business related
emails, but I know that is not happening -- with thousands of emails, I
find it hard to believe that only 10 or 20 a year are business related.
MIS has set an 8mb limit for each mailbox and has tried to get people to
copy emails to their hard-drives with limited success. Our system is set
to bounce any emails once the limit is hit and to automatically empty
the deleted items folder whenever Outlook is shut down. MIS does nightly
backups which are rotated every seven days. So what we have available to
analyze is seven days worth of whatever people have left in their
inboxes overnight plus whatever individuals may have saved to their hard
drives.
 
Second aside, we are not subject to SOX or FOIA and to very few
regulations, plus our litigation risk is very low. Our interest in
managing emails is strictly business efficiency.
 
Sorry this was so lengthy, but I figure more details will help you form
your responses.
 
Nolene Sherman
Records Manager - CJ Segerstrom & Sons
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