Email and other communications technologies are used by agencies to conduct business. To maintain complete, accurate and reliable evidence of business transactions, it is essential to manage all messages as records.

Many email archiving solutions enable email to be transferred from an agency’s primary email server to another storage system. Vendors claim the following advantages for users:

• improved control over email (including audit trails)
• filtering and automated or semi-automated classification
• secure, tamper-proof copies
• compliance with regulatory requirements (usually United States requirements, such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, 2002 on accounting standards)
• ease of discovery for litigation or freedom of information purposes
• improved disaster recovery and business continuity
• cost effectiveness
• reduced storage requirements – elimination of copies of the same message (and attachments) in multiple inboxes
• reduced load on servers

Many of these advantages are worthwhile in an agency’s overall information technology infrastructure. However, these systems are not always suitable for managing email as records. Problems with these systems include the following:

• It is difficult to differentiate between business critical, informational, personal and unsolicited commercial emails.
• Records communicated via email are separated from related records in other formats and systems.
• Generally only the sender, recipient or an administrator can access the messages, which means that other staff do not know of the existence of messages. If more widespread access is available, there may be problems protecting personal privacy, especially if personal email use is permitted.
• It is difficult to change the title of the message to better reflect the content (making retrieval more difficult). Automated classification of content is not foolproof – messages are not reliably linked to their business context.
• It is difficult to assign different retention periods according to the different activities documented in the messages.

Email archiving solutions may benefit an agency, but they are no substitute for capturing email into a proper records management system. Records management systems provide total frameworks for capturing, maintaining and providing access to evidence of transactions over time – they are not just pieces of storage technology.

Australian Government agencies using email archiving solutions should consider them part of an information storage solution, not an information management solution. To maximise returns on their investment, agencies need to professionally manage their information.

See IT systems for more information on creating systems with records management functionality. See Managing email for futher advice on emails.