MPP and Beyond

Yesterday, October 9th, 2007, I read an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal about yet another big company that was embarrassed and put at great legal risk by sloppy email archival and retrieval policies. This time the victim was Qualcomm who found damaging emails well after their disclosure deadline in their ongoing patent dispute with Broadcom. Their trial attorney wrote a lengthy apology letter to the judge and a whole lot of people have a lot of egg on their faces from their sloppy IT policies.

As the Wall Street Journal says “Failures in finding, saving and sharing emails are bedeviling large and small litigants, undermining their credibility with judges and affecting the outcome of high-stakes trials. New federal rules have reinforced companies’ obligations to produce electronic evidence, which has exploded in volume as emails replace phone calls and other business communications.”

The key that I want to stress is the finding and sharing aspects. Our email archival solution, MPP, focuses on Posfix and other open source and Linux email servers. I speak with many customers and read many mailing lists and I see the false sense of security that people lull themselves into because they have all of their companies email in one big mailbox or blindcopied (bcc) off to another location.

Mindlessly copying email or saving it in an electronic equivalent of a junk drawer is about as useful as putting your spare car key in the junk drawer. If you can’t find your spare key when you need it you may be late for an appointment, but if you can’t find email when a judge wants it the consequence will be worse. For the company that you work for, they will be stuck with fines and high legal bills. If you are the consultant that dreamed up the hair brained scheme to save all email in the junk drawer you can be certain that your engagement is done. If you are the IT manager that dreamed up this scheme you can be relatively certain that you will be fired as well.

Of course you probably had mentioned that the company should be serious about email archival but your requests probably fell on deaf ears. Many of the solutions out there are quite expensive and are entirely MSFT focused. Once you take out the Exchange and .NET capabilities many of the email archival solutions offer very little, yet they are still quite expensive. There are many archive services, but not everyone wants to outsource this capability or maybe you just never did it because you had this great idea that was free and seemed like a good strategy.

Our email archive solution with MPP is ideal for Linux email servers and other Unix based open source email servers. We leverage open source, but we also offer great full-text search capabilities, fast retrieval and export and web based access. In short, with MPP you can still use all the open source software you are comfortable with but we tie it together and give you an email compliance and retrieval system that will save your butt when the pressure is on.

Of course a great email archive and retrieval product is essential to your archive solution, but you also need a solid policy for what is saved, how long, what is imported, etc. and this will be covered in future posts.

Technorati Tags: email archival, archive, email compliance, postfix, linux email server