Simon, thank you so much for taking the time to respond to my e-mail. I
note that you work for a public utility. That is exactly the environment
in which I believe a more robust approach to managing e-mail would make
sense. That's because of the strong project orientation of such
environments, marked by both long term retention needs and collaborative
records keeping. I also see such applications working with elected
officials, legal environments, planning, executive level operations and
other such areas where the more extensive control is justified by
business need/risk.

Note that such environments represent a relative minority of employee
e-mail accounts in Multnomah County. In our environment, many of our
users are dealing with transactional processes on a large scale to
provide - for example - public health services, jail management, etc....
Records keeping in these environments are less dependent on e-mail, and
more dependant on systems oriented towards structured workflow and/or
client based case file systems. In fact, transacting certain business
via e-mail is actually prohibited in some of our operations. 

There are a number of common conceptions about e-mail that I take some
issue with - not because they are not true, per se, but because their
application to a broad user base is somewhat exaggerated. Among those
conceptions are e-mails need to be shared in a common system accessible
to other members of the team; to effectively do that e-mails need to be
classified; e-mails have long term value; and e-mails present legal
smoking guns. These statements are all true in specific environments,
yet they are not necessarily true in others (in our case, I doubt they
are true for the vast majority of e-mails). What is true in all
environments is the following statement: based on content, e-mails may
be records, when they are records they fall under certain records
keeping requirements, and need to be managed in the normal course of
business. Within that statement, though, there is considerable variance
in the approaches one can choose. I also believe minimalist "big bucket"
approaches are often both legal, and more than adequate to catch the
smoking guns. In my experience, the biggest public records
embarrassments have come not necessarily because of content, but because
e-mails were not even minimally managed "in the normal course of
business".

Dwight Wallis, CRM
Records Administrator
Multnomah County Fleet, Records, Electronics, Distribution and Stores
(FREDS)
1620 S.E. 190th Avenue
Portland, OR 97233
Phone: (503)988-3741
Fax: (503)988-3754
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