Freedom of Information Act : Executive Summary

Freedom of Information Act

Legislation & Email Archiving : an update
Executive Summary
Key aspects of the act
Code of practise on 'The Management of Records by Public Authorities'
Questions to ask your email administrators
References

Executive Summary

For some time now email has become the communications medium of choice for organisations, but not withstanding its inherent benefits, the use of email has by virtue of its success created a major problem around the storage and retrieval of information contained within emails. IDC estimates a 3000 user organisation on average generates 1,032 Terabytes of “email only” data per year.

The amount of email data held is vast and still growing, with the ability to retrieve emails and the data held in them getting increasingly harder. A recent Osterman Research survey showed that power workers send and receive a total of 19,000 emails per year, and that email volumes are growing on average 37% per annum.

It’s almost impossible to locate any single piece of information held in email backup.

Ask an email administrator to find specific data held within current emails from a collection of individuals and you might as well ask them to find a needle in a haystack. Asking them for emails referencing a particular event or contract from two or more years ago is asking them to perform the near impossible.

The usual technique to search and locate emails over 180 days old is to restore a Mail Server from backup tape and manually search the mailboxes. It is shown to cost an organisation in the region of £38,000 every time such a search occurs.

An email server is not a storage device.

The correct storage of emails for efficient retrieval requires that all emails are indexed and stored in a relational database. This allows any email, or piece of data contained within an email, or attachment to an email, to be retrieved by a simple query.

In response to various industry compliance demands, all popular email systems (Novell GroupWise v6.5, Lotus Notes v5 & v6, Microsoft Exchange 5.5, 2000 & 2003 and Sendmail) now contain appropriate mechanisms to capture all email prior to any user intervention. This facility ensures an archive is complete and accurate, therefore providing a good starting point for search and retrieval.

This document highlights the legal reasons and good practise regulations surrounding management of information stored in emails, and reasons that every public body should install an email archiving database. There are two main reasons a public authority should implement email archiving.

Centralised Legal Discovery: To allow compliance with the Freedom of Information Act through nontechnical legal and FOI staff, and enable IT staff to respond to internal staff requests.
User Mailbox & Storage Management.: Older emails can be removed from the email system itself, increasing the reliability and longevity of the email infrastructure, whilst still allowing staff access to archived, historic emails from within their existing email client or a web browser.