Big buckets for e-mail can be a good first step for managing e-mail records, but it won’t eliminate the need for more detailed records classification later.

Identifying and managing e-mail records is consistently rated as an area of concern for most organizations – commercial and federal alike. We all know that e-mail should not be considered a record category unto itself, but instead should be retained based on its content—and we also know that not all e-mails will even meet the criteria to be a record. In a perfect world, every employee of the organization would have the time and knowledge to identify e-mail records and categorize them according to the corporate records retention schedules, applying disposition accordingly – on a daily basis!  However, the sheer volume of e-mails, limited employee time to devote to filing, and the lack of Records Manager oversight into individual e-mail boxes necessitate a more automated approach.    Organizing e-mail records in big buckets has become popular since in many instances it provides for more efficient implementation in electronic records systems, including e-mail systems. However, if the system is not a comprehensive one that manages e-mail from end-to-end, it can still fall short of managing an appropriate final disposition of those contents.

Recently, there has been a trend of organizations filing e-mail in a big bucket fashion, whether or not these schemes conform to the organization’s records retention schedule.  According to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), a big bucket, or large aggregation, schedule consists of items covering multiple related series of records and/or records in electronic systems. A traditional schedule, on the other hand, consists of more granular items, typically covering records in one series or electronic system. For e-mail big bucket schemes, typically three or four buckets are formed around record groups with different retention requirements such as:

• administrative records (2 to 3 year retention)
• mission records (dependent on the organization)
• a budget and finance set of records (5 to 7 year retention possibly)
• long term/historic/permanent records (indefinite retention).

In addition to these “managed” buckets, in which users can further organize e-mail records per the organization’s file plan, the Inbox and Sent folders are also managed by rules where content may be sent to a deleted state after a period of time. This system forces users to move content to the managed folders or risk losing it.

This is fine, to a point— that point being the end of the required retention period. However, most of the e-mail management tools do not have the capabilities of a full-fledged records management application that automates the process— locking the records, starting the retention clock based on events and similar actions, and providing an authorized manager the ability to perform a review process and authorize a final disposition action (deleting or archiving the record). This being the case, there typically needs to be an additional (and more manual) process to review and disposition the items.  As noted earlier, there may also be some mismatch between the e-mail retention buckets and the official periods given in the organization’s records retention schedule, which will  require some risk analysis since some records are bound to be retained longer than required.

This process is better than ignoring the need to organize and disposition e-mail, but the best course of action is still to implement a comprehensive system that manages e-mail from its creation or receipt to its final disposition.  Big bucket e-mail storage can be a defensible process, if operated in a regular and consistent manner.  Let us know if your organization has had success using this type of process.

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