E-Mail Message Management

What to save

For efficiency, security, and organizational purposes, e-mail must be classified. According to the InfoSec team, e-mail can be classified into four categories, each with their own retention guidelines:

·         Executive Correspondence (Usually Permanent)

·         Administrative/Fiscal Correspondence (usually 4 years)

·         General Correspondence (usually a year)

·         Ephemeral Correspondence (usually retain until read, then destroy)

Definitions:

Executive Correspondence

·         Executive Correspondence includes communications to or from University executives at the level of Board of Trustee, President, Vice President, Provost, Dean or Director related to the administration, policy-making, development, growth, and major activities of the University.

Administrative/Fiscal Correspondence

·         Administrative Correspondence pertains to the development and operation of a department and includes, though is not limited to, clarification of established policy, planning and forecasting, internal audits, project and event planning, and personnel issues.   All email with the information sensitivity label Management Only shall be treated as Administrative Correspondence.  To ensure Administrative Correspondence is retained, a mailbox admin@uc.edu  has been created. If you copy (cc) this address when you send administrative email, retention will be administered by UCit.

·         Fiscal Correspondence is all information related to revenue and expense for the company.  To ensure Fiscal Correspondence is retained, a mailbox fiscal@uc.edu has been created.  If you copy (cc) this address when you send fiscal email, retention will be administered by UCit.

General Correspondence

·         General Correspondence is routine in nature and includes appointment setting, the announcement of meetings, inquiries regarding the office and its programs, information requests, and other routine business matters.  The individual employee is responsible for email retention of General Correspondence.

Ephemeral Correspondence

·         Ephemeral Correspondence is by far the largest category and includes messages not constituting University records, such as personal email, listservs, reference material, and advertisements.

 Where to save email

Saving email in the online mailbox has a number of advantages, the contents are backed up by UCit and they can be accessed by many methods such as mobile devices that communicate with the Exchange server or using the Outlook web access (https://ucowa.uc.edu).

Some e-mail users download the contents of their mailboxes to the hard drives of the computers they are using to read the mail. This happens if you are utilizing the POP3 protocol in a client such as Eudora, Thunderbird or Outlook Express. Other users set up personal files (.pst) in Outlook and direct their mail off the server into their .pst files. This puts the responsibility for backup and maintaining e-mail messages on the individual users. UCit cannot restore these messages if they are lost.

Many people utilize a combined approach. They keep some email in their online mailboxes and move other mail to pst files. Many times they store their .pst files on a network drive that gets backed up. However, as above, e-mail stored on .psts are not accessible from hand-held devices or OWA.