Research conducted and donated to the profession by Mr. Wilkins
Abstract
Despite email’s having existed for more than 35 years, and despite the explosion in email volumes and attendant storage requirements, most of the guidance available to organizations today takes the form either of email policies or vendor white papers. Email policies provide a good starting point for email management, but many of them are limited to acceptable usage, privacy, and the occasional nod to litigation holds. And vendor white papers are often suspect because they tend to reflect the vendor’s strategies and approaches. Many of these white papers are written by, or in collaboration with, respected analyst firms but even these can raise more questions than they address because they are sponsored. This white paper is the result of research conducted to understand the current state of affairs with regards to email management today. While some conclusions can be drawn, much work remains to be done in order to identify effective and defensible practices for managing electronic messages effectively.