WOW!

Lots of varying opinions on the value of email 'archiving' solutions -
some see it as the answer to the ultimate question on records
management, the universe and everything, others see it them as merely
dumb repositories of messages.

I wrote the National Archives of Australia Advice that Glenn advertised
early in the thread, so it is easy to see what side of the fence I stand
on.

If you store each and every email received by an organisation, you will
be storing a load of rubbish. Half of the external mail I receive (it
seems) is spam, most of the other half is from the various RM related
listservs. Very little is worthy of retention after I read it (or delete
it). Very little of the mail from inside the organisation is worthy of
retention - a lot of it is stuff for information, etc.  The sender
should capture that information into our recordkeeping system.

The very small proportion of my received email that does document a
business record is captured - by me -  into a recordkeeping system. Our
organisation's recordkeeping policy gives me advice on what constitutes
a record which must be captured.

I am totally bewildered by the concept of a couple of 'big buckets' to
store records. In the paper world, we had the concept of a 'bucket'
which contained records of the one transaction/business activity/etc. It
was designed to make the management and retrieval of records easy. It
was called a 'file'. Our particular recordkeeping system allows me to
create files to stick my records in, so I can retrieve them at a later
date.  If I had a couple of big buckets to stick things into, it would
be hard to locate the records I wanted later - even with full text
retrieval and other digital wizardry.

The Archives Advice
http://www.naa.gov.au/recordkeeping/rkpubs/advices/advice69.html lists 6
areas where the majority of email 'archiving' solution fall down on
recordkeeping functionality. They are:

    *  It is difficult to differentiate between business critical,
informational, personal, and unsolicited commercial emails.
    * Records communicated via email are separated from related records
in other formats and systems.
    * Generally, only the sender, recipient or an administrator can
access the messages, which means that other staff do not know of the
existence of messages. If more widespread access is available, there may
be problems protecting personal privacy, especially if personal email
use is permitted.
    * It is difficult to change the title of the message to better
reflect the content (making retrieval more difficult).
    * Automated classification of content is not foolproof - messages
are not reliably linked to their business context.
    * It is difficult to assign different retention periods according to
the different activities documented in the messages.

They equate to designation of 'recordness', appropriate relations to
other documents, appropriate access, appropriate searching, appropriate
classification and appropriate disposal (disposition). All very
important things.  I would see the first 2 items as the most important.
If your particular breed of email 'archive' can do these things, then
that is a very good thing.  If it cant, then you will have to rely on
good old fashioned recordkeeping.

John Lovejoy
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This is a posting on behalf of me, not them.

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