Exceptional retention strategies

I have the good fortune to spend a significant amount of time with customers and prospects discussing the fundamental philosophies around email archiving and retention – setting aside technology and considering the underlying principles that ultimately drive the most granular functional details. An interesting principle I have noticed emerge in recent months is what I characterize as an "exception driven model" for email classification.

First and foremost – it’s worth reiterating that some clients adopt a strategy of saving "generously" – that is, capturing and retaining a very broad range of most, if not all, email communications that pass through the mail server. Of course not every organization adopts such a cautious approach; many endeavor to capture and save only those messages which are business relevant or business records – during the normal course of business operations at least. Now for organizations such as these, a critical element of the strategy is the process of determining which messages are actually worth saving, and the consequent act of capturing and retaining them. The massive volume of daily email often makes it a dubious prospect to consider each and every message for retention, particularly if some user thought and action is a part of the process.

This aforementioned "exception driven model" is all about setting an expectation for how information is considered by default. Organizations that adopt an exception driven model assert that messages are transitory (that is, not appropriate for retention) by default, and the explicit act of dictating otherwise must first occur prior to any message being saved. If a user-directed approach to classification is employed, it may be the act of dictating a message’s category that then triggers its subsequent capture. If a more automated approach is taken, whatever criteria that triggers the autoclassification must first be met, prior to the message being captured and retained. Otherwise all content in a mailbox is by default transitory, will not be automatically archived, and most likely will be purged from the mailbox after some pre-determined and relatively short time period, such as 90 days.

This sort of exception driven model is particularly compelling in user-directed scenarios, as one cannot easily expect users to manually deal with a hundred, perhaps even hundreds of discrete items per day. Reducing the classification and retention of emails to exceptions only – supplemented by a simple decision tree that ultimately dictates actual relevance – is increasingly becoming a cornerstone of many email retention strategies I observe.

In short, such a strategy is characterized by the notion that emails are transitory by default, and without measured and overt action to dictate otherwise, they will be purged from the mail environment in a timely manner. Of course – such a practice is only appropriate during the normal course of business operations. In any scenario where information is potentially discoverable or otherwise likely to receive greater scrutiny, it is crucial to suspend any such actions and implement a legal hold process. A company should not be expected to save everything forever – but at the end of the day, acting transparently, consistently, and with demonstrable good faith will go a long way to determining how one’s retention policies are considered.