The first email was sent in 1971 between two computers sitting side by side in the same room, but it traveled through ARPAnet, the ancestor of the Internet. This marked the first time a message was systematically transmitted across a computer network.
The insightful remark by J.C.R. Licklider, quoted above, was made just a few years later when email was still confined to a limited circle within the scientific community, with widespread use at least a decade away. Licklider, a psychologist from MIT who conceived some of the earliest ideas of a global computer network and significantly contributed to ARPAnet, had a remarkably clear vision of what was to come and a prophetic sense of the role that this new medium would play in human communication.
Today, email is by far the most widely used form of written communication. It is estimated that more than 100 billion emails are sent daily, with that number projected to reach 300 billion by 2010. Additionally, over the last decade, it has become increasingly evident that in business, government, and even personal activities, a crucial share of relevant information is exchanged through email. In many cases, this information exists solely in email. For example, it has been estimated that email accounts for about 75% of corporate intellectual property.
Given this, the need to preserve and archive email has become clear. It would be unwise to preserve other documents while neglecting email, where the majority of information is concentrated. As a matter of fact, in recent years, many corporations and government agencies have dedicated significant resources to email archiving, triggering a market expected to reach half a billion dollars in software licenses and maintenance services by 2008.
A more detailed analysis reveals several motivations for email archiving:
Storage Concerns
The volume of email messages that corporations and large organizations must handle is vast and growing rapidly. However, email servers were not designed to store and manage large amounts of messages and attachments for extended periods. Consequently, most organizations enforce size limits on their employees’ mailboxes, often leading users to back up messages they consider important on their own PCs before they disappear from the servers. This process is informal, uncontrolled, and unreliable, with backed-up messages accessible only to the individual users who stored them—if they can still find them. Addressing storage concerns remains the primary motivation for email archiving and the strongest market driver.
Strategic Relevance
Email messages have become an increasingly important and strategic resource for organizations, and therefore should be centrally managed and archived according to precise and well-defined criteria. This approach automates and accelerates business processes, potentially leading to substantial savings by reducing the time spent locating and retrieving messages. Moreover, when an archival solution is implemented, email messages can be integrated with other organizational data and analyzed to monitor business processes and extract knowledge that can inform business strategies.
Regulatory Compliance
In recent years, many companies have faced substantial fines for failing to preserve corporate email records. For instance, in 2005, Morgan Stanley was fined $1.45 billion—an event some have dubbed a “legal Chernobyl”—for being unable to produce corporate email records during an investigation (due to lost or unrecoverable backup tapes). While the fines in other cases have been smaller, the total amount awarded in recent years has reached several billion dollars. In the U.S., new Federal Rules of Civil Procedure Amendments mandate that the production of electronic information is no longer optional. U.S. companies must be prepared to support electronic discovery and be able to quickly produce all records requested by the court, particularly emails, which have played a central role in many recent cases. Although the most prominent cases involve private organizations, government agencies must comply as well. Regulatory compliance has driven many organizations to implement email archiving systems in recent years, making it a significant market driver in the U.S.
Historical Preservation
Last but not least, in many situations, email messages should be archived and preserved as historical records for the benefit of future generations. This is especially important since, as noted earlier, email has become the most important form of communication between individuals, replacing paper-based correspondence and, in many cases, substituting or integrating telephone conversations. Historians of future generations may have a better chance of studying the Internet age than earlier parts of the 20th century when most rapid communication occurred via telephone, leaving almost no record in archives. We have a responsibility to preserve this valuable information.
The purpose of this document is to provide a concise but comprehensive account of the main issues related to email preservation and archiving, highlight the key challenges, and outline the basic policies and procedures. This is no trivial task, as email messages are a unique type of electronic document with a complex structure. Additionally, the specific infrastructure through which they are delivered—namely, the Internet—must be considered to some extent. Therefore, we have included a preliminary section on the email infrastructure and message format, issues that some users may view as technicalities, but which we believe are essential to understanding the challenges associated with preserving and archiving email messages.