Many companies are being buried under piles of e-mails and other electronic documents that drive up the cost of litigation and create risk. Driven by employees who horde e-mails and files, many traditional approaches to combat hoarding typically don't work. Failed approaches include limiting e-mail box size (employees engage in “underground” archiving outside the e-mail server), 30-day e-mail deletion policies (more underground archiving), pleas to employees to delete older electronic documents (I'm sure employees will get right to it) and creating cumbersome processes for “allowing” employees to save electronic documents in official repositories (employees don't bother, and they continue to save in underground archives). Employees often save older e-mails in offline PST or NSF files, where e-mails are stored separately from the e-mail server, usually on their desktop, laptop or a central file server. Once e-mails are transferred into a PST file, users never go back and delete them–they are saved forever. Some companies have started to prohibit the creation of PST files, but we have found most users find other ways of saving e-mails.

So what does work to stop the hording? We have seen companies drastically cut down on the number of e-mails and files saved through the combined use of an effective archiving system coupled with a smart approach.

As discussed in my last column, the prerequisites to an effective and defensible document deletion strategy include four elements: policies, legal hold processes, records archiving and clear guidance for employees. Be sure these are in place. The next piece is a functional archiving system (most organizations start with an e-mail archive). An e-mail archiving system can centrally capture all e-mails employees send and receive, and it can move older messages and their attachments from the e-mail server into a separate archive. E-mail stored in an archive looks to the employee the same as e-mail on the e-mail server, it's just in a different place.

Archiving systems have a number of features, but perhaps the most important is allowing centralized deletion through an automated policy. An archive can be configured to save a particular employee's e-mail for say, two years, and at two years and one day, the archive automatically deletes the older e-mail. Many archiving systems allow different retention policies to be applied to different groups of users. Automated deletion can be suspended for those messages under legal hold. There are equivalent archiving systems for “loose” files residing on desktops, laptops and shared file systems.

With an archiving system in place, e-mails or the files are moved out of the e-mail server into the archive. Additionally, organizations may “ingest” their offline e-mail PST files into the archive. As new e-mail comes in, it is moved to the archive. Some archiving systems provide the capability of providing subfolders with longer retention periods, and employees are encourage to move business records that need to be retained longer into these folders. An additional tactic is to give employees a “working folder” where they can save any type of message for up to a year or two. This helps discourage underground archiving.

This smart approach features three important tactics:

Employees can “see” their older e-mails in the archive and are given an option to retrieve older messages as needed. If users know where their messages are, they feel much less of a need to engage in underground archiving. What usually happens is when employees move e-mails into the archive, they think they will access them later, but then they forget about them.

• Deletion is centralized and controlled by the archive, not by the users. Switching approaches, we don't depend on the users to delete their own e-mails. The system does it automatically. An added benefit is centrally suspending deletion for more defensible legal holds.
• Our deletion strategy is based on employee inactivity. Older messages not classified as records or manually retrieved get automatically deleted. Yes, a small percentage of employees will retrieve more than they need, but this is now the exception.

We have measured the impact of e-mail archiving systems and found that, when properly deployed, initially the organization saves more e-mail, but once auto deletion kicks in, there is much less e-mail being saved. The trick here it to use employee psychology in our favor and not work against it.