You’ve done the hard work we outlined in the previous two parts of our series on the email beast, and now you are ready to tackle the summit of your email Everest. There are a variety of reasons to retain email, but they generally fall into two categories: “legal” or “industry/business best practice”.
Interestingly enough, there is no federal mandate (yet) directing US businesses on how much or how long email must be retained. However, if your industry is bound by legal or regulatory requirements to retain certain types of electronic documentation for a certain amount of time, you should consult with your lawyer about where this may intersect with documents and information stored in email. If your company establishes a retention policy, it’s incredibly important to adhere to that policy. Deviations or failures to enforce a formal company policy (“I have no idea where that email is, your Honor,”) are dealt with harshly in court, and will be costly. Relying on a manual process (such as Outlook’s “archiving” functionality) is fraught with failure, so any formal retention policy should be a centrally managed and maintained by an automation process rather than a human. Not all email providers include this capability, especially the consumer “free-mail” services like Gmail, Outlook.com, Yahoo, etc. Business-class service will typically offer retention capabilities as an add-on service, so make sure that if you need it, you can actually implement it on the server side.
Bottom line: If you have a formal retention policy, you must enforce it or you could face significant consequences in litigation.
If you fall into the broader, less compliance-bound audience that would like to keep track of the information that is contained in your vast email archives, consider a different way of retaining that data rather than relying on Outlook archives and your overstuffed email server hard drives. In most cases, people retain emails in order to track conversations with clients, customers, vendors, etc. If your business relies on this information, you should consider a tool that is built specifically for that purposes, and you’ve probably already realized that Outlook is not that tool. Before you despair, I do have good news for you: there are literally hundreds of Customer/Client Relationship Management (CRM) solutions that integrate very well with Outlook. Implementing a CRM solution for your company is not as easy as the sales videos would have you believe, but it may be very worthwhile in the long run.
The most crucial element in successfully implementing a CRM solution to funnel your customer/client emails into is follow-through and consistency. Everyone needs to be fully trained on how to use the system properly, and then they must use the system consistently. Most CRM implementations fail not because the software is bad, but because the company doesn’t get 100% buy-in from ones that need it the most: executives and the sales team. If everyone has sales responsiblities, then everyone has to use the CRM software.
At the very end of this long climb up “Mount Email”, regardless of what solution you choose to retain, the final consideration should always be data backups. Whether it’s a formal retention platform, CRM solution, or simple PST files, make sure your platform of choice is supported by a solid backup strategy that includes at least 2 different backup mediums. Understand how often your data is backed up, where it’s stored, and how you retrieve it in the event that disaster strikes.
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Last week we talked about our “growing” email problem. The average size of an individual email as well as the overall volume has increased substantially over the years, and some parts of the email technology platform have changed to accommodate that. In other critical areas it has only barely kept pace or fallen woefully behind. Though it’s changed its look over the years, Outlook still works essentially the same way it did nearly 20 years ago. And while we have more ways to read our email now with the proliferation of mobile devices and cellular data networks, I rarely come across a business professional who isn’t struggling to stay afloat in the growing email tide.
So how do we address this weighty issue?
First off, reduce the volume in any way you can:
- Better spam filters – the best ones work at the server level, and don’t rely on your local email client. If you are using a local spam filter on top of your provider’s “filter”, you need to adjust the settings on the server side so they never get delivered, or change providers. It’s a hassle, but a good spam filter will make it all worthwhile.
- Ditch the mailing lists – if you spend more time shuffling unread newsletters into the “later” folder, you should either look at subscribing to a less frequent digest, or unsubscribe altogether. Ironic advice coming from someone who sends a newsletter. Hopefully because you are reading this, our newsletter makes the cut.
- Separate business and personal – modern email clients and mobile devices allow you to stay on top of multiple email accounts, so there’s no good reason to keep everything in the same mailbox. Don’t go hog wild (5 separate mailboxes is just as bad as single overstuffed box), but if you are using your business mailbox for everything, you really need to move the personal stuff to a separate email account.
- Delete, don’t archive – once you get over the initial fear of throwing away an email permanently, you may find it amazingly liberating and a great way to reduce stress. Be mindful of your company’s retention policy and business practices, but delete anything that isn’t critical. Because it’s “virtual”, email becomes a convenient way for our “inner hoarder” to manifest itself. As with anything hoarded, the volume rapid overtakes any benefit gained from keeping the stuff around. Be merciless, even cruel, and give your delete key a solid workout.
A lot of you have heard this advice before (probably from me), but it always bears repeating. The only way to drink from a firehose is to reduce the pressure. Getting in front of your daily email workload will grant you time to focus on the next task: sorting, filing and putting to use the email you do decide to keep.
Make sure to stop in next week for the final part of our series on taming the email retention beast!
Image courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Believe it or not, email has been around since the 1960’s, though it didn’t make its way into mainstream business culture until the early 1990’s. Judging from some inboxes I’ve come across, some of you might actually have email dating back that far. Depending on your industry, this may or may not be necessary, but storing and keeping that much email usable is almost a universal problem that smaller businesses and individuals struggle with daily.
Are you impacted?
Some of you may be asking, “I’ve been storing email in Outlook for years and it’s only a problem now?” This isn’t a sudden, unexpected crisis, but one that has been growing (pun intended) for some time. Lately I’m seeing more and more folks hit “critical mass” and it’s due to the coincidental rise of several technology factors:
- Mobile devices with increasingly higher-resolution cameras. The iPhone can take an 8MB photo, and a 43MB panoramic photo. As a reference, GoDaddy’s email attachment limit is 20MB, and Gmail’s is 25MB. Whether their reason for sharing several high-res photos via email is for business or pleasure, a handful will put most people right over their size limit and capabilities of Outlook.
- Faster internet connections. We don’t think twice about sending larger files via email, or multiple emails to get around the attachment limits.
- The rapidly diminishing cost of storage, both in physical media like hard drives and on cloud platforms like DropBox, iCloud, SkyDrive, etc. This encourages to disregard file size, something that email (remember the tech is over 50 years old) was never designed to handle.
Combine the above with email archives going back years and you can end up with an inbox grossly over the limit. Overly large email boxes (and large email attachments) can lead to noticeable performance degradation, especially in the corporate poster child of email clients, Microsoft Outlook. Depending on your server limits, you may have been forced to move your old emails to one or more archives, which, when they too become oversized, can also lead to headaches and data loss.
Next week: we discuss how to solve this thorny problem.
Image courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net