IT teams and businesses have been talking about “email archiving” for a long time, but Topaz Filer is an “email filing” product. What’s the difference? In this article I’ll take you through both types of system and explain why both are important.
History of Email Systems
Early email systems were designed like this: when you sent an email to someone, your email client would send the email to your email server and store a copy of it locally in your “sent items”. Your mail server would then find out where the recipients mail server was and transfer the email over where it would sit in the recipient’s mailbox. When the recipient connected the email would be transferred from the server to the recipient’s email client and stored in the recipient’s local inbox.
The problem with this arrangement is that once the email has been received only two copies of it exist – your copy in your sent items and the recipient’s copy in their inbox. This diagram illustrates – the “ghostly” emails show you where temporary copies were stored as part of the transfer process.
The problem with this arrangement is that it is inherently unsafe in that if you lost your sent items folder, deleted the email or your computer was put out of action you would lose your copy. Conversely, the recipient has a similar problem – in essence emails that live in this sort of system are too volatile given that they could contain highly valuable and potentially critical information.
The next stage of development of email systems was to ask the server to hold the “master copy” of the user’s inbox. This solved the problem of the user’s computer being put beyond use – the server copy would still be available even if the user’s computer was destroyed or damaged. This diagram illustrates:
This approach limits accidental loss of the user’s mailbox as the IT teams that manage the servers are typically pretty good at keeping the server safe and secure and backing it up. However it doesn’t solve the problem of users deleting their emails – i.e. effectively allowing users to change the “master copy” of the email corpus through deleting (and possibly modifying) email messages.
Email Archiving
The problem that email archiving solves is illustrates by the following: Fred sends an email to a customer admitting fault for a customer’s problem and outlining a proposal for resolution. Bill (the customer) receives the email writes back confirming the course of action. In the meantime, Fred deletes that email from his “sent items” and Bill’s response from his inbox and leaves the company.
Several months later the problem still exists and Bill’s company decides to escalate action against Fred’s company. Fred has left. The email trial admitting the problem and agreeing a course of action has been lost. If litigation follows Fred’s company is in a weaker position because essential evidence is gone.
The principle of email archiving is that any emails that pass through the server are written to a separate store that cannot be modified. This email archive is essentially a giant “bucket” that every inbound and outbound email message is written to. This diagram illustrates:
The advantage of this arrangement is clear – Fred cannot either innocently or maliciously destroy evidence by either deleting or modify the working copy of the email in his mailbox. The mailbox no longer contains the master copy.
It is absolutely essential that any law firm or professional service firm operates an email archiving system. There are two systems that we recommend.
- If you are looking for a fully managed, outsourced, “cloud based” approach we recommend MessageLabs Hosted Email Archiving Service for Exchange.
- If you are looking for a solution where you maintain the archive “in-house” on your own servers, we recommend GFI Mail Archiver.
But, as we are about to see email archiving is only part of the solution. It solves the basic problem of not losing e-mails, but it does not provide for a smart way of handling your email corpus.
Email Filing
Email filing, as opposed to email archiving, is the process of assigning a given email to a given activity that your firm is undertaking. For law firms emails are allocated to client matters. For other sorts of organisations, emails are allocated to customer projects. Emails may also be allocated to internal projects – such as organising a works outing or building a new HR policy.
Email archiving is not a particularly intelligent process. An email archive is just a giant collection of emails. You can conceptualise it as being a room with a single laser printer in it – whenever an email is sent or received a copy of the email is “printed”, and put into a box next to the printer. Once the box is full, a new box is created and the process continues. Ultimately you have a very neat, very big set of “virtual boxes” containing the email corpus in its entirety.
Much like any corpus, the value of it lies in making sense of the information contained within. By structuring and arranging systems to keep track of and record conversations in a manner aligned to the original discourse, information can be more readily discovered and meaning discerned.
Moreover, email archiving lodges the emails in a separate to the rest of the electronic data related to the project. For example, Word documents, faxes, scanned letters and so on will all live within the document management system (“DMS”). Unless e-mails are also stored in the DMS you have to look in two places to find the information you need.
This diagram illustrates the ideal approach of having a single location containing all documentation:
But by not bringing emails through to the matter file (i.e. by leaving them in the archive, or worse – in individual users’ mailboxes), there is a disconnect – users have to go elsewhere to find the information that they need. For example:
Our product, Topaz Filer, is designed to solve this problem. Working alongside existing email archiving products (such as the two called out above), and by integrating with SharePoint or another document management/electronic content management system it is now possible to have a simple and effective mechanism for bringing the relevant parts of the email corpus “front and centre” with the remainder of the documentation the team needs to do their work.
You can find out more about our email filing product, Topaz Filer, by watching our
Introductory Video or by reading our
How it Works article.
Conclusion
In this paper we have shown that it is essential that any firm that uses email must have a strong email archival policy so that any inbound and outbound email messages are captured and stored. By having a reliable record of all email correspondence, you can be sure that the one critical email you need is available to you.
However we have also shown that simply defining a “huge bucket” where all emails end up is not sufficient. Firms that use email either as their primary form of a communication or where email makes up an important part of the communication need to use an email filing system in conjunction with an email archiving system in order to create a single source of electronic information related to a matter.
