Hi Nolene,

There are several products on the market that can capture and index all
incoming and outgoing email.  Some of these products can also apply
business logic in an attempt to identify the value of an email to the
organization.  These tools will give you a record of what email comes
across your mail server, but using these tools alone may not tell you if
someone intended for an email to be declared an official record at some
point in time.

The value of having a sound email records management practice in place
is the ability to distinguish between an official record and a
non-official record.  This could mean the difference between an opinion
and the official position of the organization.  So the question might
be, what is your organization concerned about when capturing email
records?  Knowing what has been on your mail server and/or
distinguishing between an official and non-official email record?

In my business I'm concerned about what is an official record and what
is not for many reasons, but probably the best reason is for me to have
defensible position if I require an email record to be something more
than hearsay.  It would be difficult for me to justify that a certain
email is an official record if I don't have a sound records management
business practice in place that includes capturing email records.  This
could mean the difference between winning or losing a contract dispute
if it came down to email communications as evidence.

Tim Shinkle
www.perpetuallogic.com
703-927-5650

-----Original Message-----
From: Records Management Program [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
Behalf Of Nolene Sherman
Sent: Tuesday, May 10, 2005 6:25 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Email Capture Revisited


I got several responses to my earlier inquiry that basically confirmed
my suspicions. To recap, we are a relatively small company (about 300
employees) with decent monetary resources and we are not subject to SOX
or FOIA, nonetheless the CFO wants to make sure we retain everything we
should be. He wants our IT department to find some sort of a program
that will capture all email as it comes into our servers, before being
distributed to employees inboxes. His concern is that employees will
delete something that should be saved.  My concern with this idea is the
wasted resources used in capturing the vast amounts of junk email that
is not getting filtered out. I believe we should go for a true EDMS
system in which employees are trained to file their e-docs like they do
their paper docs.

While he understands in theory that email is just like any other record,
the CFO cannot believe that companies have employees look at each email
and decide whether or not it should be kept. He is adamantly convinced
that large companies must have some sort of automated system that does
this for them. I even tried Bill Roach's example of likening it to
copying all paper junk mail that comes in the door before distributing
the mail, but he doesn't see it as the same. He will, however, discuss
with IT how they can better filter the emails before capturing them.

Am I off base here? Do many companies use automated programs to capture
and index email? How well do they work and how much programming must be
done to "teach" it what to keep? If not done automatically, how do you
actually go about capturing those records? Or are most of you in the
same boat we are, just now trying to figure it out?

Nolene Sherman
Records Manager
CJ Segerstrom & Sons * South Coast Plaza [log in to unmask]




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