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by dklimke

Relgolook – Productivity Enhancement Solution For Effective Email Management

Instant and effective communication has become the order of the day for any individual or a business entity.  In the present scenario, the complexity of communication at all levels of hierarchy need not be overlooked, with emphasis being more on prioritizing, archiving and retrieving mails in a jiff, rather than spending hours together in cumbersome email tasks.  While MS-Outlook serves as excellent email management software for your busy needs, it may however pose certain limitations in effective email management. Some of the problems you might end up could be cluttered Inbox, losing track of your contacts, junk mails in your Inbox and so on. In order to enhance the efficiency of Outlook to make your communication hassle free, overcoming the above problems, Relgolook is the right solution, specially designed to enhance your productivity manifold. It is a Microsoft Outlook Add on, which works easily with Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2007 and is quite flexible and user friendly in addressing all your communication needs.

A product designed by Relgo Networks; it is an efficient personal information organization and archival tool integrated into Microsoft Outlook, aimed to enrich and enhance your email experience to a new plane. With a host of user friendly features, it enhances your productivity by smartly grouping and organizing email relationships & information, while being equally effective in integrated archiving and restoring of groups, emails and documents. All this translates into a highly productive, efficient and an organized work environment, saving lot of time and resources.

Relgo products and services cater to individuals, service providers, businesses and corporations. Our products are commercial off-the-shelf web based software solutions and custom connected solutions. The concept “Next Generation Connected Solutions” (NGCS), comes from utilizing the connected infrastructure of people and entities to derive optimum efficiency. The solutions we offer are intuitive, cost effective and enhance quality of corporate governance and operations.

Relgolook helps in setting up relationship to email contact once, so that emails and information gets organized. Synchronize hierarchy from GAL and view email, so that information gets organized automatically for your team members, direct reports, peers and managers. Mails are automatically synchronized and organized for you. Extract unique contacts from Inbox, Archives, Contacts and GAL Sort the extracted contacts in alphabetical order or on collaboration strength Archive contact & relationship information, documents and history Export/Import contacts for exchanging with your peers Import archives View your project team’s email history View your mails from direct reports, managers, peers and so on in a group. Combine with rules wizard and segregate elegantly. Extract and set relationships to unique email contacts from Inbox, Archives, Address books and Global Address List (GAL). Extract reporting hierarchy from GAL and organize emails. Create groups based on relationship types Tag Recipients based on email groups and projects Organize Group, relation and individual emails and documents View E-mail and Document history of Groups, Relation types and Relation Search people and relationships from Relgolook or Web using check names and Relgolook search Upload relationships to Web based Relgo network Import relationship hierarchy for Peer to Peer exchange Export relationship hierarchy for Peer to Peer exchange Archive email and related documents for group, relation type and relations Incrementally archive emails and documents to existing archive.

We hope you got a brief overview of our product, its vital features and the value addition it brings to your business proposition. In the present scenario, one needs to be highly proactive in addressing vital communication issues which cannot be undermined. Thus, issues governing email organization & relationships, archival history and other factors become pertinent for any organization to introspect and review, without deviating from other crucial management tasks. Thus, it is expected that Relgolook would strike the right chord in the business circles and would become an indispensable product in the coming days.

A GMail-specific, simple, efficient way to manage email using action labels and archive labels. From the folks at www.funwithbutter.com.
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by esagor

It’s Time to Take Email Archiving & Security Seriously

With email having quietly matured into one of today’s most mission critical applications, could it be time to start taking its management, maintenance, and security rather more seriously?

As cultural phenomena go, the story of email’s emergence as the world’s undisputed champion of personal and business communication is about as impressive as any. It’s hard to believe, for instance, that there was a time not all that long ago, when deploying email was still considered a pretty big deal; when email meant specialist employee training; when half a dozen messages a day was a lot; when only the most senior management in a business could expect their own dedicated email accounts. How times change. Driven by all manner of market factors – server, storage, and software costs falling, the rise of always-on connectivity, teleworking, webmail, and mobile email to name just a handful – a robust, reliable, secure email solution is now nothing short of absolutely business critical. Indeed, issues such as email management, archiving, storage, and security now affect – or should affect – every company from SME to Enterprise, says Neil Hammerton, former CEO and founder of Email Systems, and currently VP of SaaS Development at Webroot. There are many drivers for this, he says. The need for information to be easily accessible where and whenever it’s required; Sarbanes Oxley and Basel II, which are driving archiving from a regulatory compliance perspective and which, in turn, are having a filterdown effect to businesses that don’t necessarily need to be compliant, but wish to employ best practice.

The threat of data loss is a further key factor, with industry reports indicating that 85% or more of a company’s intellectual property now passes through its email, according to Hammerton. “Businesses are conducting more and more legal transactions including quotes, orders, confirmations, and agreements via email”, confirms Duncan Ash, EMEA Business Development Manager with Sybase. “To protect both the organisation and its customers, these emails have to meet stringent statutory requirements governing document authenticity, confidentiality, and availability.”

Worryingly though, it appears that a disturbingly low number of UK businesses can be confident as regards the integrity of their email systems currently. In a recent study conducted by Vanson Bourne on behalf of Forensic & Compliance Systems (FCS), nearly half the businesses surveyed (44%) couldn’t prove email hadn’t been changed or tampered with, and more than a third (35%) were unsure whether any changes had taken place or not; results that suggest that three in four UK businesses have millions of emails floating around their synapses that would enjoy no legal standing. It uncovers a worrying reality, said Ralph Harvey, CEO at FCS. Specifically that many firms simply don’t “understand the consequences of not having a tighter control over their emails…” It’s a problem businesses simply have to address, counsels Steve Tongish, marketing director EMEA at Plasmon. “European regulations are now developing teeth. There have been recent court cases in both the UK and Germany where steep fines have been imposed when the process controlling records and the integrity of data was found to be inadequate.” This shift in risk exposure, he says, is forcing a rethink in digital archive requirements.

Malcolm Etchells is VP Europe for Waterford Technologies – a provider of solutions that allow the visualisation of email usage, data pattern analysis, and policy improvement and enforcement. He also bangs the compliance drum, citing several costly cases. “Some of the world’s largest, most IT savvy organisations – UBS Warburg, Fidelity, Morgan Stanley – have fallen foul”, he says. “(Businesses) must begin to think more proactively about how to archive, retrieve, and produce emails and related content in the event of a request from a regulatory or government body.” “… the issue is not storing the emails – that’s relatively easy – but finding and retrieving (them). Many organisations can show authorities the email in the system but can’t retrieve it. A well-publicised example is Morgan Stanley which has been fined repeatedly because of its inability to retrieve emails, with two fines of million and .5 million respectively.”

Ash warns, that there is a “conflict” between the need for strong record maintenance and data privacy law however. For example, he explains, confidential data mustn’t be kept in archives accessible to supervisory bodies, and personal emails cannot be stored without the agreement of both sender and recipient. There are pressing productivity concerns too. First, says Ash, if email is filed in an unstructured way, it’s impossible to fully exploit the information contained within it. Second, with knowledge increasingly available only within emails, companies need a way to store, access, and analyse this precious data efficiently. And a ‘save all emails’ strategy is clearly not the answer, he says. Separating what can and can’t be stored calls for sophisticated technologies. “Most specialised email archiving solutions are based on file-oriented data management systems. These are neither audit-secure, nor able to conduct a combined analysis of structured and unstructured information.”

Etchells cites further productivity concerns. According to the Office of National Statistics, he says, employees spend an average of two hours a day assessing, managing, and responding to email, which equates to 55 days a year or 11 working weeks for every email user. Translated into costs, the figures are alarming. Based on an organisation with 1,000 employees earning an average of £25,000p.a., for instance, each spending 1 minute per inbound email on an average of 40 messages per day, and a further 4 minutes creating and sending each of around 20 emails every day, the estimated cost to the business over the course of a year would be £7.5million. And that’s without the cost of email misuse and storage. So what’s the answer? Says Etchells: “Productivity is very much seen as an issue for the IT department but it cannot be held responsible for reducing the volume of email sent by, or within, an organisation. Even with adequate storage in place, creating a culture of efficient and responsible email use needs to be driven by the business, not IT.”

Urs Raas, Senior Product Manager at enterprise content management (ECM) software vendor, Tower Software offers some practical first steps. “First you need a system that can automatically move mail into an archive that uses cheap storage and is easy to maintain from a back-up and disaster recovery point of view. Second you need a system that allows the easy capture of emails into the context of the business process, alongside any other records documenting it. This is where email archiving meets compliance.”

Michael Brooke, Archive Manager Product specialist at Quest Software argues that a solution must also reduce the total volume of information stored, and not simply move the problem from a mail store to another media. “80% of email volume is attachment data and in most organisations the duplication rate of attachment data is close to 50%. I.e. 50% of the attachment storage used by a Mail server is duplicate data!” He cites easy administration and cultural ignorance as other growing issues. “IT staff are busy people and an archiving solution that requires significant management time becomes a liability.” “IT staff know that storage is not unlimited but the business doesn’t, so the IT manager is often left explaining to senior management why the legal department can’t have a 10GB mailbox. They aren’t interested in the back-ups and recovery, what if a disputed contract they sent 2 years ago is no longer retrievable?”

Implemented properly, says Etchells, the benefits can be huge. “Having an intelligent email management solution in place will provide (an) insight into email usage, especially the patterns that cause waste.” It can also help identify and eliminate non-work related email, he says, and even change the way employees create, manage, and think about email.

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by 350.org

Email Archiving: are You Prepared for Unforeseen Legal Search Issues?

As every businessperson knows, controlling costs and increasing production is the basic business formula to achieve success. In reality, actually achieving that success is a much harder and intense proposition that requires you to provide a little wiggle room on both sides of the equation to deal with those pesky, unforeseen bumps in the road.

But what happens when a situation occurs that is so outside the sphere of normal business operations that you can neither deal efficiently nor effectively with it in order to get back to business as usual? In today’s technology driven business environment, this “situation” could be e-Discovery.

E-Discovery is defined as any process in which electronic data is sought, located, secured, and searched with the intent of being used as evidence in a civil or criminal legal case. E-Discovery has the potential to become an extremely costly and time consuming undertaking especially when dealing with the retrieval of emails from archaic archiving systems commonly used today. To ease the burden, businesses are looking to companies such as Estorian who have developed software products that retrieve targeted communications sent via email and that work transparently with their own computer networks.

Still, the problem remains in that, despite the growing marketplace, businesses often do not know exactly what solutions they need to deal effectively with email archiving and retrieval. Or, if they are looking at various software packages, they do not know what key features that software should include. The following provides an overview to get you started:

• Software that is easy and quick to install, thus saving you time, money and resources during the initial set up.

• Simple user interface that is intuitive as well as easy for you to navigate.

• Multiple search options available such as keyword, sender/recipient (internal and external), date, time, attachments, subject, inbox/outbox, importance level, etc. so you can pull data from archives faster and more efficiently.

• Real time capabilities, i.e. the ability to set up recurring future searches (daily, weekly, monthly, etc.) for investigations into specific subjects/email exchanges.

• Multiple location and file save capabilities such as .pdf, outlook folder, desktop folder, etc. for easy organization of email search reports.

• Flexibility to allow for future upgrades to search capabilities regarding legal and technological advances (IMs, chats, eFaxes, etc.).

Software packages such as Estorian’s LookingGlass incorporates all of these features and more, thereby providing businesses with an easy solution to company wide email archival and retrieval. As a result of using such products, businesses are reducing their legal and financial risk by continuously monitoring e-communications records across geographic locations and technical platforms from one single, easy to use interface.

by City College Norwich

Email management plays important role in your business, handle it efficiently

Email has assumed high importance in accelerating the pace of business transactions and has become a fastest medium for communication, exchange of ideas and information. With widespread use of email in handling important and sensitive transactions, email security has become one of the critical functions of email management. Email management also involves email storage, formulation of email policy, auditing and making provision of foolproof email backup and email spam filters to ensure uninterrupted availability of email facility.

There are number of email client programmes like Outlook Express and Microsoft Outlook offered by Microsoft. These email management applications are offered free of cost in bundle with Internet Explorer web browser. Email client programmes allow users to customize as per their own preferences all the mails they receive or send and also provide option of email set up rules.

With ever increasing threat of spy ware and viruses on the Internet, it has become very difficult to handle security aspect of email management without adopting a proactive approach towards the issue. Email problem can be caused by your email client configuration through which you get access to your email account, or it can also arise with your account itself. It is more often difficult to pin point the real culprit.

In order to make email management efficient enough, it is necessary to adopt layered approach, deploying services of computer support technicians or hiring email support agency services.

You can get comprehensive email management support or email backup support from computer support services companies which employ well experienced computer support technicians to fix email problems at client’s end. These companies are like one stop shops and their email management support includes storage of email, access to users both at user levels and server levels and flow of mail. They also provide mobile email solutions.

By hiring expert services of email management companies you can protect your business from unlawful and malicious attacks. Email support provided by the email management services takes care of your email security through use of email spam filters, virus scanners and fixing of errors by providing mobile email solutions.

These email management services also do installation and configuration of your new email accounts and help set up free email accounts with your ISP. Their computer support technicians also activate spam blockers for prevention of adult spam. They assist you in framing email set up rules to facilitate easy access and storage.

More Email Management Articles

by Thwaites Theatre Photos

Email Archivers Revisited

Several years ago, email archiving was a hot topic as the new rules of discovery prompted everyone to look at how they would produce the appropriate email documents in the event of a lawsuit. Interest in archivers has resurfaced, but this time customers are looking at these devices as a solution to reducing out-of-control data stores.

The Challenge

Just as traditional data stores continue to grow, so do our email stores. It seems like an overnight explosion! But as anyone who has tried to implement an email store reduction policy knows, getting end-users to give up the items they have retained is almost impossible. Blame ENRON if you like, but people are more aware than ever that they may need to produce documentation to safeguard themselves. And in this day and age, who can blame them?

Enter the Email Archiver

More and more customers are contacting us to review the current email archiving solutions available for GroupWise. They want to use this technology as a way to reduce their data stores while giving end-users the comfort of knowing that they can retrieve a given message any time they need it. Here are a few important questions to ask as you consider the most popular GroupWise email archiving solutions on the market:

* How are you going to use the archiver? If you are simply going to use the archiver to be sure that all messages are archived per your data retention policies, any archiver compatible with GroupWise can achieve this goal – particularly if you don’t anticipate your end-users going back to the archive on a regular basis to look for messages.

* Does the archiving solution maintain the folder structure of the end-user’s mailbox? Not all archivers will do this. However, if your end-users will be looking for old messages on a regular basis, they will want to see the familiar folder structure they use every day. A search function to find the messages is not enough.

* Does the archiver support stubbing? Stubbing is a really important feature if you are looking to convince your end-users that archiving is a good thing. Stubbing allows the message subject and the first few lines of an email to appear in the end-user’s live mailbox. The result? For the end-user, nothing seems to have disappeared from their mailbox, even though technically the emails have been archived!

* Are you going to be pulling mail from traditional GroupWise archives? Again, not all archivers support this functionality. If you are not only trying to reduce your live message store but also the data stores of archive files, you need to be sure that you pick an archiver that can seamlessly accommodate this function. If not, you will have to unarchive the messages back to the live message store, archive them to the archiver, and then reduce the message store.

* How much data are you planning to archive? Make sure that your archiver is not undersized and that you can easily add storage if necessary. Many archivers support NAS, SAN, or Windows file share targets. How much space you need is completely dependent on the retention policies of your organization. A rule of thumb? Plan for growth, and then work on getting buy-in from the powers that be to prune this data at some point after the archiver is in place.

Conclusion

Email archivers are a great way to reduce live message stores without getting end-users to commit to completely getting rid of data they want to retain. And remember, reducing message stores makes for faster and more seamless migrations to new hardware or operating system platforms. For customers looking to perform NetWare to Linux migrations, this is a great place to start when planning your GroupWise server migrations.

© Copyright 2010, Uptime NetManagement, Inc.

by Urban Jacksonville

Email Management Service Provider UK

Now-a-days Email plays an important role in business. With the help of email we can schedule meetings, assign tasks, answer questions, receive product orders, check progress and exchange friendly greetings even communicate among customers, employees and business partners. But they open the door to a virus that downs the entire system. The most common way to get a computer virus is via an email attachment. Viruses can attack network resources such as servers and routers. Threats attack on the internet in the form of spy ware, ad ware and computer viruses cause concern to many small business owners.

Larger organizations still place the responsibility of managing their email systems on already overburdened and under-budgeted IT departments. They provide many service of email management. The best service will always make certain that your email campaigns are protected by the best and latest in anti-spam and delivery technology. Email management services will have strict anti spam regulations for its users. Email management services should be available 24 hours a day to offer any type of technical help. There are many tools that provide anti-virus protection for desktops at the workplace. Most anti-virus software is good at detecting viral.

Fiverivers IT Solutions offer you the expertise and technology to wipe out email intrusion for good. Fiverivers provides a wide range of services to help your business reach its desired goals and objectives. We can manage your email system and ensure you’ll get a reliable system with support from us. Therefore, an email list management service will be 100% CAN-SPAM compliant, as well as offer high email deliverability.

Services which Five Rivers provides:

Email threat protection

Fiverivers provides e-mail’s spam filter which helps in catching unwanted emails. Fiverivers services adjust them over time to minimize the spam that you receive. These spam directly to the trash – meaning that you don’t waste your time reading and deleting it.

Install anti-virus system

Every day we get bulk emails that take our time as well as block the resources of our computer and email clients. The only way to get protected from this problem is to install an anti solution spam that will give you Fiverivers. Fiverivers IT Support email management service that your email campaigns are protected by the best and latest in anti-spam and delivery technology.

Email Policy Management and Encryption

Fiverivers apply content and attachment filters. Fiverivers Email management starts with setting up and using filters. They control user access to personal quarantines and settings. Apply these and other policies company-wide, or just to groups or individuals.

Remote email access from anywhere in the world

Fiverivers provide Remote Email Access service that gives the user the ability to access, receive and send emails in any location. You can access your copy of Outlook simply and easily via the web with safety.

I hope these email management services helped you discover what you need to look for in email list management services. Make sure you’re using these Fiverivers email management services smartly. For a very affordable email list management service Visit www.fiveriverssupport.com

www.jatheon.com – Why Archive Email? Jatheon Plug n Comply appliance is a complete solution that allows organization to comply with government regulation with a simple, secure and integrated product. Plug n Comply is the industry leading appliance that effectively captures, indexes and stores all email and instant messaging enabling you to enhance email management and achieve regulatory compliance needs. Maintaining a sole record or email communication is mission critical to business today. In addition companies must be prepared act quickly in the case of litigation or compliance regulations. Jatheons email archiving solutions are being used by companies all over the world across all industries. Whether it be law firms, banks, insurance companies, engineering firms, health care agencies, and municipal and federal agencies, all companies no matter what the size, see a need for the Jatheon email archiving solution. The Jatheon solution helps organizations meet their storage space management, compliance, legal discovery, mail platform migration and policy management requirements. Overall, Jatheon offers a comprehensive, cost effective and easy to deploy archiving appliance that requires minimal IT support and simple management of corporate data, making it a suitable solution for companies of all sizes. Jatheons email archiving appliance has a number of different ROI characteristics that make the decision making process a relatively easy one. * Reduced overall capital …

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by City College Norwich

Email Management Policies and Why Businesses Need One

Email management could be a company’s saving grace in today’s world of litigation and information overload. Email is now one of the most used communication systems around, over which important business decisions are often made, therefore an adequate email management system is vital to any business.

Managing one’s emails effectively could result in a much more productive work environment in terms of organization and timeliness, as well as helping with audit purposes. Furthermore, recent legislation has made it mandatory that all businesses and organizations need to be able to produce any documentation requested by the courts if legal issues arise.

Email Archiving as part of email management

Email archiving is one of the first steps to a successful email management program. Administrators can maintain an archive of all the company’s email correspondence which will be easily searchable and recoverable, and therefore reduce the dependence on PST files that can easily get corrupted and are not secure backups of email data.

Moreover, in order to comply with eDiscovery requests, email archiving is a must, whilst being able to access archived emails and corporate data in a matter of seconds can help realize a return on investment and therefore boost the company’s productivity.

Legislation and Regulations

Apart from the legal benefits that an email management policy presents, it is also important when dealing with inter-company issues such as harassment or dismissal charges, where critical information may have been recorded via email.

If an employee used his work email account for illicit purposes, verifying such a fact could prove to be a difficult task without an adequate email archiving system.

Email management from a legal perspective requires organizations to keep records of email documentation for a minimum period of up to five years. Such legislation includes the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) which affects all industries and imposes severe penalties on anyone who deliberately alters or deletes documents with the intent to defraud third parties.

Even though it is a US law, SOX act is also applicable to European companies with US listings as well as to companies that do business with the US. There are other legislations that also require companies and organizations to archive emails, as well as government bodies that comply with the regulations set by the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), the Patriot Act, National Archive Records Administration (NARA) and other legislative entities.

Storage & Knowledge Issues with Email Management

Managing one’s emails is not only a legal and compliance issue but also delves into the fields of storage and knowledge management. There has been a dramatic increase in storage size due to the increase in email usage over the years as well as the upsurge in attachments sent with original emails.

This increase has affected the efficiency, reliability and speed of message servers. An efficient email archiving solution stores emails in a compressed format, resulting in considerable disk space savings and centralizes your email records.

Furthermore, emails are automatically archived as soon as they pass through the message store, thus users can clean up their mailboxes without the worry of losing important emails. Additionally, an email archiving solution that allows authorized users to view emails from a central repository will encourage them to do so without having bulky PST files stored locally.

Large volumes of email correspondence, increased storage limitations, government regulations and potential legal implications have made the need for an email management policy a critical issue for any company. Managing emails through archiving allows organizations to have control over employees’ email accounts whilst ensuring regulatory and corporate compliance.

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by moggs oceanlane

Email Compliance with ediscovery

Email has become the most prominent form of correspondence with great value attached to its use. Email can be used for external and internal purposes and is extremely vital in the daily commercial activities of a business. Email is the equivalent of paper documentation and is considered legal and valid proof for litigation purposes. Email is documentation of conditions agreed upon by two parties and can be used as supportive evidence when implicating another or while defending one’s integrity.

Since email messages are legally approved documents that need to be provided in case of a lawsuit, there is a need to store them in a secure place and ensure all security measures are in place to prohibit any tampering attempts. The storing of email is called archiving, and it locates any specific email at any time in a secure environment. The electronic discovery service helps in simple management of email and compliance with an efficient e-discovery and often times archiving strategy.

Why Email Compliance?

Organizations should implement a robust compliance system that will record all logs and activities of users as well as audit and encrypt data to retain it in its original form. Deliberate attempts to destroy data can prove to be potent litigation evidence. Ediscovery solutions can help identify relevant dat, but that data cannot be identified if it has been deliberately deleted. In legal cases, if the parties involved are incapable of furnishing relevant email evidence, fines may be imposed by the courts and cases can potentially be lost. .

Determining Ediscovery Factors for Email Compliance

It is not an easy job for organizations to maintain email compliance standards given the steady stream of correspondence everyday. Ediscovery can help management handle compliance issues. Here are some factors that need to be taken into account to maximize the use of ediscovery solutions for email compliance.

1. An efficient ediscovery solution uses an integrating approach that takes care of all processes while creating no complications. In due course, organizations will be faced with situations where they need to add applications. A good ediscovery solution should be capable of providing the integrating facilities to avoid additional costs in the future. Archiving is achievable only when an integrating facility is provided.

2. To maintain records and secure compliance, ediscovery tools should be able to manage different types of data within a single archive. Having a single system to handle various data formats eliminates the creation of multiple archives.

3. To save on storage space and ensure simple archiving administration, the ediscovery tool needs to ensure there is no duplication of data and convert several copies into a one to make the process smooth.

4. The structural design of electronic discovery service should be such that processing is not concentrated at one single point, which can slow down the pace of the searching and indexing processes.

5. The main purpose of archiving is to make search easy. Ediscovery search should have the capacity to bring up successful search results with little delay when keywords are used. Searching for exact results should be possible in a transparent manner.

Litigation cases can be rendered useless without enough proof to validate statements, resulting in heavy financial and reputation losses. The ediscovery solution promotes an efficient system of searching, producing data through a flexible and transparent system.

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3 Things Businesses Need to Know About Email Compliance

In today’s business world, we are nothing without our email. Now, we don’t even need to be sitting in our office to hear the ding of our inbox, alerting us that yet another message has arrived; we live in a time where smart phones are everywhere and we can have our email with us at all times. With all this new technology though, there has also come an onslaught of laws that are designed to keep email compliant with things like customer privacy, law enforcement investigations, and corporate governance. In short, the purposes of the laws are to make sure that email is being used, and managed, properly.

If you work for a doctor’s office, you certainly know about HIPAA. The two rules that affect email compliance are the Privacy Rule and the Security Rule. Of the two, the Security Rule is more in-depth and essentially mirrors the Privacy Rule; its purpose is to focus on information and security best practices and revolves around the security cornerstones of confidentiality, integrity, and availability. The Security Rule focuses on everything from workstation management of information to facility access and transmission security. It is vital that any information you send via email, not speak of the patient’s identity or the problem they are facing; many offices will use initials when speaking about patients via email.

In the financial industry, email compliance is governed by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. Also known as GLBA, it is basically the same law as HIPAA, just for a different type of business. It is designed to ensure the privacy and security of non-public personal information as it relates to individuals financial information. GLBA’s rules apply to mortgage lenders, banks, stock firms and others of the like. Within GLBA, the financial company is charged with several things: to designate an employee or employees to coordinate the information security program, to identify reasonably foreseeable risks to non-public information, to make sure their suppliers are also using safeguards, and to monitor all of the above.

On top of these two rules, there are also others. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act, also known as SOX, is watched over by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. This act was designed in response to the various, and highly publicized, bogus financial reporting in the early 2000s. SOX discusses what information may leave an organization and how long the industry should keep information on file; it requires that financial companies keep emails on file for six years. Likewise, the SEC Rule 17a-4 and NASD Rules 3010 and 3110 affect email communications within the financial industry.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. When it comes to email compliance, there are rules everywhere, and your business needs to know which apply to you and how to handle them. There are several ways to handle these issues, most of which include hiring at least some type of IT security firm to develop a total information security plan that will comply with recent, and future, government email regulations.

by TechShowNetwork

The Benefits of Email Compliance in a Business

Email has become the standard method of correspondence used by businesses sending important and sometimes confidential messages. Such sensitive information needs to be archived for possible future use in order to comply with eDiscovery requests, specific regulations as well as the company’s email compliance policies.

Email correspondence is used for both internal and external affairs therefore it is important that a copy of all emails is archived for possible future needs relating to legal, compliance and human resource issues. A company must also be in a position to respond to eDiscovery requests at short notice.

Why a company needs email archiving

Existing regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA and the FRCP treat emails as being equal to paper-based documents in terms of valid and legal documentation presented in a court of law and are therefore admissible during an eDiscovery request.

eDiscovery is the process of locating, securing and using documentation from a company’s archives in a legal setting, so a company must have the ability to procure the necessary documents with the confirmation that these have not been tampered with. Failure to abide by procedures could result in court fines and other financial burdens, as well as a failing reputation.

How email archiving should be implemented

For security, maintenance and resource reasons, email archives should not be archived on the mail server but should have their own localized server that is specific to the task.

Having your emails archived on a separate database ensures more protection for the archives should the server crash, as well as lightening the load on the server. When archiving is another process that the email server is meant to handle, its resources are being stretched to capacity risking poor performance in both tasks. A dedicated email server and a dedicated archiving server render the upkeep of both machines a simpler and cleaner process.

Moreover, separate backups of both servers ensure a safer environment, as by having the archived emails on a separate server, should the email server crash all is not lost since the archived emails would be accessible and easily recoverable meaning that work can be resumed from a certain point.

Email archiving compliance

In industries and countries where regulations require organizations to monitor user activity and keep audit trails, a system that records, logs and retains a database of user activity, or other secure methods such as encryption will ensure that emails have not been tampered with as this would render them inadmissible in a court of law. An auditing facility is also important for compliance purposes.

Log files and counts must prove that all emails (including their attachments) are being captured and can be searched for, found and viewed in their original format. Advising users that their emails are being recorded and archived will act as a deterrent to any abuse of the system.

Email archiving is becoming a standard practice in today’s businesses as the implementation of a successful email compliance policy could save a company a lot of time, money and resources, and provide guarantees that it is in a position to respond to eDiscovery processes and fulfil the requirements of compliance regulation which the company must adhere to.