The essential guide to overcoming email retention challenges

As asynchronous and remote work continue their ascent into the mainstream, employees everywhere are continuing to lean on (arguably) the most tried and true method of work communication there is: email.  

While instant messaging services like Slack or Teams certainly bring their own value to the mix, they don’t carry the same perceived permanence of a good old fashioned email. But with this seemingly permanent commitment to email communication, organizations are forced to reckon with the complex challenge of mailbox compliance.  

Why is email mailbox compliance so challenging?

First and foremost, the sheer volume of data created by an email mailbox complicates things. With more information being added every day – are rarely being manually deleted – mailboxes are fluid entities. Plus, the contents of a mailbox are vastly diverse and can include anything from a buy-one-get-one offer on froyo to classified government documents. It’s all in the mailbox.  

Because of these issues – and plenty of others – organizations must carefully strike a balance between preserving important communications and proactively deleting irrelevant information. Let’s dive deeper into these common mailbox compliance challenges.

• Data volume: For larger organizations, the number of emails sent daily can be in the millions. Not only does this volume of data strain storage systems, it also forces the organization to pay for data storage, which can be a significant expense for both those million-message-per-day companies and smaller businesses that can’t afford to waste a cent.  

• Retention policy decisions: Most public sector organizations and enterprises, such as financial services firms, are subject to stringent record retention regulations that include email communications. Based on these regulations, organizations must ensure they have retention policies that cover email. Given the vast diversity of data within mailboxes, implementing these policies can be incredibly challenging.  
  
  Different types of emails likely require different retention periods, based on the legal, regulatory and businesses obligations associated with each. Determining and implementing these periods is a time-consuming task, which requires regular upkeep. Again, finding the right balance of what must be kept and what must be disposed of remains a hefty challenge.  
  

• Email categorization: Classifying email records according to relevant retention schedules is often not scalable and typically requires extensive manual effort.
  
  Relying on employees to handle crucial email categorization can result in inconsistencies and human errors. Manual email categorization not only reduces productivity, as employees spend considerable time organizing their inboxes, but also presents significant scalability challenges. As email volumes grow, manual retention processes become impractical and fail to scale effectively.
  
  Archiving all emails can lead to increased retention for "just in case" scenarios, but storing large volumes of emails can result in significant costs over time as storage needs grow. Without proper categorization and retention policies, organizations may struggle to comply with legal and regulatory requirements.

• Legal and regulatory compliance: Depending on where your organization is based and operates, you’re most likely bound by data privacy regulations, which determine how you must store, manage and dispose of consumer data. More than likely, you’re subject to a few of these regulations, meaning you can’t simply implement a one-size-fits-all approach and hope to maintain regulatory compliance.  

• Security and privacy concerns: Emails that are deemed important enough to be retained in employee mailboxes frequently contain sensitive information that could pose a risk to your organization as a whole. Because of this, emails like these need robust security protections to ensure careful handling of customer data.
  
  A large email archive can become a target for cybersecurity threats, and managing and maintaining such an archive requires ongoing resources and infrastructure, adding to operational overhead and complexity.
  

• Employee behavior: If there’s one factor that you can’t do much about, it’s the human element. Even if your team understands the importance of following email retention policies, it’s unlikely they’ll remember to move important email records to another system for management according to your retention policies. Even the best employees make mistakes, and when mistakes carry the potential of large fines, it’s simply not a risk worth taking.  

• Technology limitations: Many solutions claim to tackle the issue of email compliance, but are in reality nothing more than email archive repositories, ultimately leading to more issues with over-retention. Most platforms lack the sophistication required for timely retention and disposal, and don’t offer native integration with existing systems. True mailbox compliance requires seamless connections to existing infrastructure, and the ability to actually handle compliance actions, including retention.  
  
  For example, many of the leading email archiving solutions cannot provide formal data disposal certificates, which play a key role in ensuring defensible disposal.  

The importance of strong retention policies

Implementing robust email retention and disposal policies is crucial for organizations to navigate the many challenges of mailbox compliance effectively.  

As an example, the City of New York has a role-based email retention policy that provides a framework other organizations can learn from – and it’s simple enough to actually be useful:  

• Role A: Mailboxes of policymaking employees are retained permanently

• Role B: Mailboxes of non-policymaking employees are retained for eight years

• Role C: Generic (non-personal) mailboxes are retained until no longer useful

This tiered approach allows for efficient management of email data while ensuring compliance with legal and business requirements.

Solving these challenges requires courage and a strategic approach. Enforcing a strong email compliance policy requires collective courage across the organization, from executives exchanging confidential information to frontline staff whose inboxes are relatively uncomplicated. Defining clear retention and disposal policies to mitigate risks is a cornerstone of maintaining mailbox compliance across your business.

Of course, you also need the right technology to improve the way you manage employee mailboxes, to ensure periodic disposal happens, according to predefined retention schedules.  

We designed the RecordPoint Microsoft Exchange Connector to be flexible enough to work for any organization, but sophisticated enough to handle even the most complex array of employee mailboxes.  

With the Microsoft Exchange Connector, you can:

• Define which mailboxes are managed and how  

• Perform periodic disposal: Ensuring items within a mailbox are disposed of according to a predefined retention schedule.  

• Apply legal holds or freezes to any mailbox, to prevent the policy being run on that particular mailbox.  

• Defend your organization's email records management processes in legal matters by demonstrating that email retention and deletion policies are consistently applied and that records are accurately retained or defensibly disposed of.

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