This is a timely topic that many companies are dealing with. The first, brief, answer is that there are no products out there that can sort anything other than spam, spim (IM spam) or spit (VOIP spam).

The first layer of sorting should be for SPAM that goes directly to the digital dust bin.

There is no sorting after that other than what the employee does. First, lets compare with hard copy mail. When you sort you throw away the junk mail you don't want and look at what you do want. You open the other mail and determine its importance, throwing some away, leaving some to be read later, and putting some in the work pile. What you have done here is not sorting "record" from "non-record" (a worthless notion to my thinking). You have sorted material of value from material of no value. Only the employee decides that (how many times has your partner thrown out the very catalog you were looking forward to reading?) according to very personal notions.

The next level of sorting (that probably occurred during this last action) is to determine what needs immediate action, what can wait a little, and what can be set aside for perusal and decision right there.

The buckets you provide the employee in your classification should include immediate purging, personal files, business emails for meetings, lunches, etc., and reading materials all of which can be deleted after fairly short periods of time. Each workgroup will have other categories that will have a short duration, like travel expenses. Arbitrarily setting those at 30 or 90 days won't work because sometimes the employee needs to keep things CYA that the email administrator would like destroyed, but could actually keep the employee employed.

Other buckets in the classification will be for documents held for a longer period of time.

As of this writing, many email management products permit classification in the "in box" and the "sent items" folders, but do not permit classification when the document is actually sent. Personally, I do not believe these will be successful in the long run. There are a few integrators and companies that have figured out how to have people classify as the document is sent.

Yes, there is a larger volume of individual things to classify. It isn't like going through the average five to ten things employees received on a daily basis. They may be going through 50 to 100 now. Yes, this is more work.

Unfortunately, you must make a policy that _everything_, yes, _everything_, must be classified. You must also expand the notion of what is being classified. Spam is classified as spam with a retention of zero. Personal emails are classified as personal and have a variable retention, though you should be able to put limits on how much and where those personal things are kept. Work-related emails of short duration must be managed through classification that permits some input from the employee--though that input could be expedited through advisories that if they do not act the emails would be purged.

Notice we haven't even gotten to the issue of "recordness" because the real management of email occurs long before some ECM company forces their French notion of "declaring" a document a record on you (yes, the notion originally comes from France and pays no attention to the real world of FOIA or litigation discovery).

I help companies with this every day. Eventually, chief legal counsel comes to the conclusion that every employee chooses to classify every email (deletion is a form of classification), or chooses not to work at that workplace. CFOs and CIOs are not used to being the bad guys so they have trouble with this. They see themselves as enablers. By trying to be the good guys, they are creating more problems for the company than they are resolving.

We sorted our hard copy mail, why are we having trouble sorting our email?

Best wishes,
Carol
Carol E.B. Choksy, Ph.D., CRM
CEO
IRAD Strategic Consultant. Inc.
(317) 294-8329

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