A pretty common decision by corporate IT is to run spam checkers and delete ‘undesirable content’ before it gets to the corporate mail servers. Of course – e-mail archivers, often the repository for e-mail records, are only picking up sanitized copies of the e-mail traffic. But, what if something gets marked as spam, isn’t? Shouldn’t you save EVERYTHING? Just in case?
Let me share two examples:
A while back, I met with a Calgary based oil well equipment supplier. The owner of the company had been offended that messages with profanity had come in from spammers. Not only did he not want to see it, but he wanted to protect his employees from that nastiness. He laid down an edict to IT – "No e-mail with profanity should be allowed in". Sounds reasonable. Pretty easy rule to implement with the spam checkers.
Now, think about a Texas oilman, who’s production just stopped because of an equipment failure. He doesn’t always use the queens English. He may throw a few colorful explicatives in – just to make his point. If IT had followed orders – legitimate emails would’ve been dumped by the spam filter. Now, not only is the equipment broken, but the vendor is unresponsive! In this case, the poor IT guy made the decision to route all all spam matching the profanity filter to himself – for ‘human filtering’.
My second example of improper spam deletion came from personal experience with EMC, my own previous employer. It took me months to find out why many of my e-mails weren’t getting to their recipients. People were furious with me – "Clark, why didn’t you send …". After many frustrating attempts, I was finally put in contact with the EMC IT person – in charge of protecting the company from bad e-mail. He decided that any email with a reference (counter) number in the subject was spam (i.e. RE: Re[2]: Hi!), even if it came from a known sender. Why did they do it? Because, as I was told, spammers do that. Well so do legitimate users! To make matters worse, he had also made the decision that ‘bouncing’ even though required by the internet standards, wasn’t worth doing. So I couldn’t tell what was going and what wasn’t.
Funny thing – that e-mail police guy at EMC was ‘Doc’ something or other. Now, it’s a good thing that my filters don’t eliminate things from people purporting to be of a medical background. It’d be an easy rule – those doctors are always sending me offers of prescription drugs, things to enlarge this, and reduce that… I don’t think he was a real doctor…
People and systems are often over zealous in their attempts to protect our people and systems. Obviously there are costs on both sides. Maybe your archive engine and RM policy should be further up the chain – to ensure that valuable data isn’t lost.
So, are you intentionally destroying valuable business records?
[...] Why pay for extra e-mail storage? I agree with my friend and fellow Boulderite Clark Hodge that you should never throw anything away online. Like I said, having access to archived e-mail has indeed saved my butt. Clark blogs about data storage on StorageSwitched. OK, he’s more extreme than I am — he thinks you should even save spam. But he’s a smart guy. If storage matters to you, definitely subscribe to his blog. [...]