• Do you need to meet legal and government requirements for electronic email record keeping?

MailStore provides a 24x7, tamper-proof process for capturing and preserving email in a secure archive, making it easy for you to comply with government regulations and the demands of the legal discovery process and electronic record keeping.

• Do you need to monitor email corporate policy compliance?

MailStore lets you search email traffic including the contents of attachments and find non-compliant messages within seconds.

• Do you need to improve productivity of employees dealing with email?

MailStore permanently eliminates the “I accidentally deleted it” problem and lets you find the exact message you need in minutes not hours, saving valuable time that can be used to focus on your job.

• Do you need to find a solution that works and doesn’t take forever to implement?

MailStore is built on a stable, mature document management system. It’s easy to integrate with other applications and is up and running in hours not weeks!

Imagine having your organization’s emails and attachments neatly tucked away in a single, secure repository, up and running, automatically archiving your email within a couple of hours.  So you, or anyone you allow, can search, retrieve, and view it.

• Wouldn’t you sleep better if you could support your email archiving management policies, and meet regulatory compliance guidelines?

With Alchemy MailStore from IMR, you can.

How does MailStore do it?

MailStore software from IMR solves the problems of email regulatory compliance and records retention by capturing email from Exchange or Outlook in a secure repository, so it can be selectively stored and managed as a record, and retrieved at any time.

You can use MailStore for Exchange by itself, or combine it with MailStore for Outlook.

The result, a solution that keeps both the system administrator and the end users happy and keeps the auditors, and lawyers twiddling their thumbs.

• Fast : MailStore offers out-of-the-box integration with Exchange 5.5/2000 and Outlook 2000/XP so set-up is extremely fast  often in under one hour  and there are no third-party software requirements.
• Compliant : MailStore for Exchange has rules based policies to control which email is automatically archived, making it easy to meet regulatory guidelines for email record keeping. Rules can be set for individual mailboxes and include email address or domain, sender and recipient, and even the content of the subject line.
• Simple : MailStore is simple to implement, giving users one-click access to email archives with no complex interfaces to master.
• Flexible : MailStore writes to hard disk, CD or DVD, WORM, optical libraries and more, capturing emails and attachments, whether they are documents or images. You can even create stand alone CD or DVD versions with selected emails to satisfy the demands of auditors or lawyers.
• Searchable  : MailStore uses full text indexing to search the message text, and even the contents of the attachments. Data compression and a robust search engine find emails fast. You can even view any of the archived email records and attachments without the original application.
• Expandable : By combining Alchemy products and extensions, you can create a total document management solution with functionality that's customized to your company's needs.

Article by Joan Tunstall - “IMAGE & DATA” - Oct.2003

Email data management is more than an IT problem. Content access and records management could pose an even bigger challenge to organisations. Christine Gill reports

There are many people who believe it is preferable to restrict the size of email mailboxes to control data storage costs, minimise the possibility of data corruption and not overburden backup systems or email servers.

They're called email administrators, storage administrators and IT managers, and you can't blame them for seeking to protect and control the costs of the IT systems they manage. Unfortunately, taking an IT centric view of the email storage issue will not protect the business. Imposing mailbox size limitations, thereby encouraging email deletion or the creation of personal desktop archives by end-users, addresses only the data storage aspect of the email management problem.

That is the view of Joan Tunstall, author of Better Faster Email & Easy Email published by Allen and Unwin, "With the tremendous and ever-increasing volume of email, that is the part of problem that's easiest to see, especially from an IT perspective. But the hidden problems of content access and records management make email data management more than an IT problem and more than an end-user problem. These other aspects of email management are ignored at a company's peril.

"Consider the types of information conveyed by email in an enterprise; sales proposals and requests for proposals; marketing plans; drafts of strategic planning documents; competitor profiles; quarterly revenue forecast; contracts, and personnel files. IDC estimates that 60 percent of business-critical information is stored in messaging.

"This means that email data management, or the lack of it, affects over half the data used to run a business," says Tunstall, who is also StorageTek's Australia/New Zealand marketing manager.

Important documents may be lost during a routine purge of old email messages or by email recipients storing in a haphazard fashion outside of the email system. Information contained in old email messages may be required for any number of business purposes. For example, the sales department may need to access a draft of a contract; customer services may need to review communications that promise certain rewards to customers; human resources may have a question about an employment offer. Because each individual user decides which email messages to retain or delete, much of this information is hidden from the rest of the organisation.

In a company of 1,000 people, that means the company has 1,000 different data retention policies. When an employee becomes unavailable, the wealth of mission critical information in his or her email becomes essentially unavailable. This is the content access challenge of email data management.

Records management is the other challenge of email data management, says Tunstall.

"Organisations in the securities and exchange community need to maintain compliance with various rules for records maintenance. State and Federal organisations may be required to respond to Freedom of Information requests. Any business may find itself in legal or regulatory circumstances, which require information stored in email or as attachments. Responding to such requests places a tremendous burden on IT resources.

"Backup tapes must be restored to a replica of the production email server. A search may span several email servers and, in some cases, the personal archives of hundreds of desktop computers."

Industry experts estimate that costs for fulfilling a single discovery request runs from tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars. For example, the cost of recovering 246,000 emails from approximately 4,900 backup tapes was estimated to cost the White House an estimated US$ 10 million [Washington Times, May 4, 2000].

"The lack of adequate email data management may be putting your organisation at legal risk," warns Tunstall.

The facts show that email is far bigger than just messaging; and the challenges of email data management are threefold: storage, content access, and records management with surveillance capabilities. Old email practices pit the need to retain information for future access against the need for email server availability. A better method of email data management ensures that the right information is available when users need it, now and in the future"

Joan Tunstall advises that any solution should address the requirements of users IT administrators management and record keeping professionals by providing the following benefits

- Reduced IT costs through more efficient email server management Automated capture integrated support for low cost mass storage and content based classification rules can transform an organisations temporary cache of messages on the server into a tool for enterprise document management

- Quicker lower cost discovery actions Full text indexing and cataloguing enables email discovery actions to be completed in hours rather than weeks greatly reducing expenses

- Increased productivity through faster easier access to stored messages Full text indexing combined with a powerful search engine would allow end users to access their own messages while authorised managers and administrators could search across multiple mailboxes for audit regulatory requirements discovery requests and other business needs

- Record management An effective solution ensures adherence to formal email policies with enterprise level data management tools that categorise and manage email through a useful life cycle

- Virus recovery and data protection An effective solution also ensures that email records are tamper proof throughout then life cycle and guards against abuse by monitoring compliance with corporate policy