Big bucket email management organizes and stores your company’s emails until their designated expiration date.

Be honest: do you hoard your work email? Is your inbox chock full of old, meaningless messages that you can’t bring yourself to delete just in case you might need them later… like mass emails recognizing other people’s birthdays? Happy hour invitations from last month? Two-word replies to simple questions you asked several weeks ago?
Or maybe someone you work with is lax in keeping their email organized. Has their inability to retrieve an important message ever thrown a wrench in your work flow?
We are all guilty of email hoarding at one point or another. Plus, keeping the inbox spick and span is not a top priority when your workload gets crazy. When you’re in the middle of a merger, or you are stuck sitting through dozens of interviews, or a massive deadline is looming, cleaning up your old emails is the last thing on your mind.
But what happens when you really need to retrieve an important message that you can’t seem to find in your cluttered inbox? Being able to locate a message that is vital to a project, a legal proceeding, or even your job security is of paramount importance. This type of emergency situation is where a big bucket email management system might be a solution of great benefit to you and your organization.

What is big bucket email management?

An email message may (or may not) be a record, depending on its content.  Email messages that are business records should be managed as corporate assets.  Today’s constant flow of email messages into and across the office calls for a robust email management system that allows companies to organize their email. A big bucket email management system is one potential solution that features several storage buckets (i.e. Managed Folders) with different retention spans. When an email’s  retention requirement has been met based on the email’s creation date and the bucket’s retention span, the email is automatically deleted.
For example, emails with short retention requirements might be put into a bucket where they are stored for 18 months. When an email reaches its 18 month mark, the system automatically removes and deletes the message. For emails that have anything to do with taxes, purchases, or other financial records however, a seven year bucket (minimum) may be the more appropriate storage space. Each organization has its own records retention requirement needs, and that’s why each big bucket system is set up from scratch for every company.

How can we make sure big bucket email management works for us?

Because every person in the organization with an email address has to take personal responsibility for managing their own emails, support from upper management is crucial for a successful transition to a big bucket email management system. Training sessions for all employees should explain how the system works, what their responsibilities are throughout the transition process, and a list of reasons why the new system is important for the continued success of the company.
Managers and directors should establish a schedule by which everyone commits time to bucketing their backlog of emails. Once old emails are dealt with, it’s important to emphasize the need to bucket emails consistently. In fact, bucketing should be done on a daily basis whenever possible.
Earl Johnson, Jr., CRM, Senior Records Manager for Cadence Group Associates, advises, “With everyone on board and simple policies in place, the system will streamline the company’s email management, reduce the build-up of unnecessary emails, and simplify message retrieval in the event that you must urgently find important data.”
Johnson will be speaking about this topic at ARMA’s 60th Annual Conference & Expo, held at the Gaylord National Harbor Resort near Washington D.C. from October 5th-7th. Please visit the Cadence Group team at the 2015 ARMA Conference in Consultants Corner Table #835-3.
If email organization is an ongoing problem in your office, consider implementing a big bucket email management system. To learn more right now about how a big bucket system could benefit your company contact the RIM specialists at the Cadence Group.

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