Save That E-Mail!

by Lowell Rapaport

A number of Wall Street firms have recently run into trouble with the SEC for not keeping e-mails for the legally required three years. According to a May 7th article in The New York Times, "a firm that deleted e-mail messages that it was required to maintain could be found guilty of falsifying business records."

The importance of e-mail archiving has been underscored in several high-profile legal cases. In some instances, businesses are developing nonretention policies to excise potential smoking guns from internal records. In other cases, agencies such as the SEC require e-mails to be retained. Financial services and government agencies in particular are under pressure to make sure e-mails are archived and accessible for a specified period of time.

Every enterprise should have e-mail and document retention and life cycle policies in place, both to ensure that important documents will be available when needed and to eliminate any ambiguity as to why certain records can't be found.

E-mail archiving software is available from a number of sources. TrueArc integrates with Microsoft Exchange and archives and categorizes e-mails according to a taxonomy as they are created. OTG makes E-mail Xtender and IMXtender for archiving both e-mail and instant messages. And Tarian makes a software development kit for adding document life cycle management to any application.