>http://shrinkster.com/12um
>
>Is De-Duplication Legal?
>via Death By Email Blog by Roger Matus on 10/28/08
>Many email archiving companies have touted their de-duplication
>capabilities. The argument is that substantial savings can be found by
>saving one copy of a message when there are copies that are identical.
>One study from a vendor claims that 80% of all emails are duplicates.
>
>But, when is a duplicate actually a duplicate? InBoxer believes a
>duplicate is only a duplicate when it is 100% identical including the
>meta tags (such as date, time and routing information). At least one
>court now seems to agree.


This posting and article raise a very valid question- depending upon how the
searching algorithm is structured to determine what is 'identical' there is
a potential for copies that are not exact duplicates to be deleted.  And
there would have to be enough intelligence built into the product being used
to determine which is the 'original' in the first place to decide which one
to keep when all others are deleted.  Only the message from the initial
sender would include the cc and bcc addresses, which would indicate everyone
the message was sent to for whatever reason.  

And if the sender determined (after the fact) they forgot to include some
parties and they forwarded the message to them, could these be seen as
duplicates because the text in the body remained unchanged?  What if one of
the recipients decided to forward it with no comments added?  Could that
also be seen as a duplicate?

As discussed in the past, I think a lot of this depends on the industry
segment you work in, and how heavily regulated you are.  The SEC, FERC and
FDA have very specific requirements for managing e-mail based on the
content, and part of this includes retaining the information on all
recipients and IF the system includes acknowledgments of receipt, these must
also be retained.  Same is true for most/all Federal Agencies as part of the
requirements in 36CFR 1234.24.  

De-duplication is a method of reducing storage volume, but may also be a
means of increasing risk. Organizations should carefully weigh the cost
benefit and make decisions on this basis prior to implementing this as part
of their storage strategy.  

This is another example of why records managers need to get themselves into
the front row and start asking questions and providing advice to the
organization prior to the deployment of technologies related to the managing
of information.    

Larry

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