Enterprise Email Management
Introduction
What is the state of play with corporate email systems today? Where do they succeed and where do they fall down? What common problems do organisations regularly run into?
For many modern organisations, email is an integral part of their communications platform, for handling both internal and external correspondence. Over the last decade the volume of email communications flowing in and out of our businesses on a day to day basis has grown exponentially.
Whilst much media attention is focused on the explosive growth of spam, the fact remains that we are increasingly dependent upon email as a means of communicating with colleagues, suppliers and customers and co-ordinating our daily activities. Indeed in many modern organisations, email communications form a vital cog in the supply chain process.
The volume and importance of email being handled by individuals is now at a level that for many employees their job productivity and efficiency can be directly linked to how effective they are at managing their Inbox each day. Tales of managers drowning in floods of email correspondence hitting their Inbox is a common problem we face in the modern e-world.
Compounding these issues, email attachments are typically stored in an unstructured manner on both local and mail server connected hard drives. This makes the retrieval, transparency and accessing of what is essentially valuable corporate information problematic.
Personal or Corporate Correspondence?
Increasingly, many organisations are realising that sending out an email via their email infrastructure is effectively equivalent to sending out a letter on company letterhead. Because the official organisation domain name appears in the email address, it can be perceived by recipients as official company correspondence sent on behalf of the company by a particular employee. This has led to the practice of automatically attaching lengthy legal disclaimers to all outbound emails.
One perception that many organisations take is that if an email is sent through a company mail system, with an employee's name, job title and contact details contained within, then it is corporate correspondence and their employees therefore have a responsibility to understand the obligations and duties such a policy entails.
Personal or Corporate Information?
Like phone based communications before them, email communications are used by employees for both personal and work purposes - i.e. for organising with their partner who will pick up the kids from school for example, or even booking a restaurant. Many organisations are accepting of employees utilising email at work for these communications, especially as email communications can take far less time to execute than an equivalent phone conversation.
The rising popularity and capability of free, public, web-based email services such as Yahoo, Hotmail and now Gmail (Google Mail) also provides employees with alternative means of accessing and sending personal emails in a manner that minimises the responsibility of their organisation for the content of such emails sent during working hours.
Where organisations are happy for their email system to be used for personal correspondence, there will still be an obligation to inform employees that company email may be used for personal correspondence, but they need to be aware that such email correspondence remains corporate data (or property) and if required, appropriately authorised managers will be able to access such data.
The fact is that if email is created, stored and sent using corporate assets such as mail client software, mail server hardware/software, intranet network infrastructure and bears the official corporate domain name (i.e. hotmagna.com is the official domain of HotMagna the corporate entity), then that organisation may decide that they have a legitimate claim (and indeed a possible legal responsibility) for storing and archiving all email correspondence as a corporate information resource. The focus then shifts from whether the mail should be stored to issues such as - Who is authorised to access it? Under what circumstances? What audits are in place? What security mechanisms protect it from unauthorised access?
The Deletion Dilemma
Emails are typically deleted from employees' Inboxes, often because they do not want them to clutter up their view of immediately important emails. Typically a quick decision will be made by an employee to either move an email and store it in a separate folder, in case it is required for future reference, or to delete it from the Inbox. As deletion is the easiest (i.e. fastest) action, unless a clear reason to keep the email can be immediately thought of, for many it is the action most frequently taken.
The problem here is that the email correspondence deleted may often be useful for reference at some stage in the future - it is hard to empirically judge if any given email will be needed in the future. This is the dilemma facing many people as they try to manage the vast amounts of email arriving into their Inbox.
Ideally all email correspondence should be kept for some sensible length of time (i.e. several years) in such a way so it does not clutter the view of more immediately important emails, but readily accessible should a future situation arise where it would need to be referenced.
Email as an Information Resource
Email is not necessarily a one-to-one conversation. Many different parties can be included in the distribution of a message. One limitation of our email systems today is that whilst it may not be practical to be included in the distribution of every email correspondence between other employees in your organisation and a given client for example, often situations will arise where you will retrospectively need access to this correspondence for which you were not an original party to. To give just a few simple examples:
- A customer rings up asking about why they did not have an invoice item refunded on their current bill. They claim to have received an email from another employee (who has since left the company) who authorised and acknowledged the refund.
- A new employee starts and is made a member of numerous email distribution lists to ensure they are made aware of all relevant company memos. However, they have no access to that important memo sent the day before they started informing employees of new important health and safety regulations changes.
In these sorts of situations, email needs to be viewed as information resource to be managed in much the same way as customer contact details are managed in a CRM system, or stock inventory in an inventory management system. The ability to access this sort of rich vault of data can provide a variety of clear advantages for organisations, such as:
- No lost correspondence. When customers or clients ring up, employees can instantly get hold of any relevant email information regarding that client and be guaranteed that the email trail they are viewing forms the complete picture of correspondence between their organisation and that client.
- Improved efficiency. With an email information resource, employees do not have to chase around to find out "who said what to whom". No need to ask their colleagues to forward on correspondence with a customer they are dealing with, or to ask that they be cc'ed on important correspondence with customers.
Corporate Governance Implications
All organisations will have particular storage requirements for all emails sent and received, driven by not just operational requirements, but more significantly by legal and commercial requirements.
Emails are rightfully becoming recognised as crucial legal documents in their own right that a company will need access to in the case of dispute resolution with external or internal parties, such as a customer law suit against them, or a employee sexual harassment investigation. In these situations it is essential that:
- All electronic correspondence between relevant parties over the relevant period be retrieved. It is particularly important that there be no gaps or missing documents so that the set of email retrieved provides as accurate a picture of the case as possible.
- The authenticity of the emails is beyond reasonable dispute. The email management system must be capable of ensuring the authenticity of emails stored to avoid fake messages being sent, or existing messages being altered.
- The organisation can demonstrate they have taken due diligence in storing and archiving important legal documents relating to the operation of their business. This may be particularly important in cases such as taxation audits or a customer/client/partner dispute resolution process.
Desktop Maintenance Issues
Modern email systems are largely accessed through client side mail management programs such as Outlook and Mozilla that store and manage mailboxes locally. This model has a large impact on desktop maintenance activities particularly for large organisations. Maintenance of mailbox file storage limitations is a decentralised process. When staff leave, change locations or even when they receive a desktop upgrade, there are considerable desktop maintenance activities associated with deleting or migrating mailbox data.