E-mail archiving's security concerns

We don't archieve Email messages as a corporate standard. The servers are backed up nightly but only saved for 1 week then reused. As a corporate policy the Email systems are not retained or archieved.

If your company is involved in a Law suite - and they find out you have archieve Email - all that old mail can be reviewed and used.

Our policy is it is up to the individual - if they wish to save their mail - we show them how to replicate to local machines - Email backups are not permitted on Networked drives or storage - for the same legal reason...

I would not recommend Archieving Email messages as a corporate policy ... permit it as an individual option for local or off line storage.... Check with your legal department and see if they agree.

with your companies legal department. The bank where I consult does backup all of it's e-mail but only for use if some form of law suit is brought against them for somethig=ng that one of their workers has sent out as it is possible to alter an e-mail and then forward it on to a third party with unknown conquences. So they backup everything just in case something like this happens.

However this is a new pratice as recently they had a suit brought against them by someone who was refused credit and somehow an e-mail was leaked to this person who's contents where like nothing that was in the original it was actually quite deflametary in fact and if we could not prove that the recieved e-mail to the third party was not exactly what we sent there would have been a horendious payout involved.

Most people don't realise that e-mail is the same as letter writting so I advise all my clients never to put in an e-mail what they would not be prepared to comit to paper and always backup any sent e-mails just in case someone alters the original so at least you have some proof that what gets recieved by some third party was not what was sent originally. But this is a legal minefiels and it is up to each indivual company as to what they want to do in this area.

Because this is a bank involved we get some leniency from the courts just so no one can go on a fishing trip and gather something totally unrelated we can provide the required files to the court for them to read and then forward on any that are pertant to the case in question but general business doen't have this luxery so it is one for the legal department to answer.

You never addressed the "security concerns." I was interested in your article, but unless I fell asleep, I missed the security concerns. As far as security goes, are you talking about others reading the wrong mail or being able to retrieve others emial?
Thanks,
Charles@altex.com

I am not aware of the law that requires all email to be archived in healthcare. Please enlighten me.

The legal requirements to archive email AND INDEX THAT EMAIL FOR QUICK ACCESS BY AUTHORITIES will inevitably spread into more regulated industries. There are two technologies that must be included in an effective solution:
1. Most SPAM should be filtered and dropped from the inbound mail stream BEFORE it reaches the organization's mail server in order to minimize the storage and indexing requirements. If any email reaches the server, it is constructively received by the organization since the filters internal to an internal mail server can be construed to have "read" the email on behalf of the organization.
2. Identical components of mail objects (e.g. attachments) should be backed up ONCE with references from those mail objects. This saves an exceptional amount of archival storage.