Your company or organization has finally decided to implement digital data archiving. Your appliance has been installed, all data have been migrated, and now what? Now you apply policies, of course!
What is an email retention policy?
An email retention policy is a company policy that defines how long email messages should remain in your email archive before they are automatically deleted. These policies largely depend on specific government regulations and vary across industries. The first step is to get informed about which laws and regulations apply to your industry and then create policies that reflect them.
How does email archiving make it a smooth process?
Preserving the original form of all email messages, both sent and received, is absolutely essential. That’s why we use email archiving in the first place. But how do you control who removes emails after a policy expires? How do you track which policy applies to which group of messages? How do you know whose messages to preserve and for how long? And what if you want to create your own policies? It would be a nightmare to do this manually.
The prime benefit of email archiving in terms of retention policies is that emails can be removed after a specified period (typically after 7 years) without manual intervention. Automating this process is key as it fully eliminates the possibility of human error, prevents tampering with email contents and removes liability.
Automating email retention policies is key as it eliminates the possibility of human error. Click To TweetAutomating policies allows you to sit back and focus on other tasks
Another convenient thing you can do on a premium email archiving appliance is create your own internal company policies. These might be created by admins based on internal documents. Policies and rules may also require adherence to specific professional guidelines. For example, if you want to ensure that your staff aren’t using any foul language while communicating to each other, the appliance can monitor only internal conversations and email exchanges and then notify the responsible persons.
A note of caution
Remember that it’s not always a good idea to keep all your messages indefinitely. Wondering why? Firstly, you’ll get fresh storage space once the unnecessary emails get deleted. And, perhaps more importantly, the appliance doesn’t allow you to go on a delete binge and remove some emails that should be retained forever. In other words, there might be some emails that are on legal hold, and your email archiver will prevent the deletion of such items.
Make sure that the policies you create reflect the laws and regulations that apply to your industry. Click To TweetTo read more about creating and enforcing an email retention policy, read our eBook “Email Archiving: Best Practices for Today’s Leading Enterprises”. To get a better idea of how the creation and management of policies works in practice, schedule a demo with Jatheon today.
