* Enforceable e-mail archiving policy could possibly help them all out
As a technical media outlet, Network World has certainly posted its fair share of commentary on the alleged “lost” e-mail issues weighing on the White House and the Republican National Committee (RNC).
On March 29, we posted an article from sister IDG pub, Computerworld, which detailed how some White House officials used an outside e-mail service provided by the RNC for political e-mail correspondence and that those messages may have gone missing.
NetBuzz blogger Paul McNamara points out that it’s worth considering that the particular e-mail messages in question were supposed to be unattainable, and therefore no amount of technical precautions would have helped to find them.
Senior Editor John Fontana followed-up with a story on just how difficult it is to really, truly lose an e-mail message. And Fontana’s story sparked a bit of debate in a Network World Community Forum where readers argued that completely deleting e-mail either by accident or on purpose is not all that difficult to pull off.
And then last week, columnist Mark Gibb’s weighed in with a suggestion that takes away the “dog ate my homework” excuse with a mandated archiving system for governmental messaging of all types to be housed in a data vault deep in the Nevada desert.
And while McNamara may have found the pitch from an e-mail archiving marketing exec ironic given the particular political circumstances, the vendor’s point does hold at least a little bit of water. If an enterprise has an established e-mail archiving and retention policy that is routinely reviewed and enforced, recovering e-mail messages for litigation purposes will be more of a science than a witch hunt.
Network World’s Email Archiving Buyer’s Guide comprises more than 20 product listings. Tap into this guide to compare how these products help set messaging archive policy as well as the measures each offers to assist in enforcing it across your entire organization.
