The practice definred as 'archiving' isn't anything more than making copies of every mesasage and retaining them with no respect to storing records by content, or assigning retention rules to them.

The practice that needs to take place is to evaluate the e-mail to determine if it is a record (according to an organizations definition of a record and policies)based on it's content, assign a record series to it, and set it's retenion based on those factors. This allows the deletion of many e-mail messages that are not records, and ensuring that those that are records are only retained as long as required.

There are few (if any) requirements that ALL e-mail messageds must be retained, and if they are retained, during a legal action, the organization MAY be forced to search them all and provide copies of potentially damaging e-mail messages that could have otherwise been deleted.

In RIM (records and information management) terms, archiving is the practice of retaining records of high value with lengthy retention requirements for long periods of time and ensuring they remain viable fo rpersistent access.

In IT terms, 'archiving' is to copy and/or remove data from on-line storage environments and manage that content in a storage repository... and THAT is NOT Records Management.

Larry Medina