Businesses send billions of emails every day. They are a quick, easy and convenient communication tool saving hundreds of millions of man hours every year. It allows organizations to react and communicate quickly and effectively throughout the world and has allowed the business world to become truly global.
 

Proper use of email can increase your reach and reputation as a business and significantly reduce the cost of communicating with other organizations. It is almost impossible to comprehend a modern business without email nowadays.

When things are going well, email is an amazingly helpful tool that works for the good of everyone.
 

When things don’t go quite so well, email can be used against you. People make mistakes, say the wrong thing, or in the wrong way, and if it is done over email there is a ‘paper trail’. If the worst happens and the situation involves litigation, then email can be used as evidence.
 

You may have to produce emails to the court either as a defense or through an e-discovery request. To be able to do this in a timely manner you will need to have an email archiving solution where you can quickly retrieve the emails in question. If you don’t have such a system then it could take a long time to find the emails in question or leave you in default if you cannot find them. This is not a good position to be in.
 

The governing bodies who ‘own’ the various Acts are quite intolerant of non compliance and have been known to hand out stiff penalties to companies who have not been able to comply with e-discovery requests.
 

If the absolute worst case scenario were to happen and you had an employee or someone who was deliberately removing the trail of evidence then a proper email archive solution would protect you. The employee may be able to remove all locally stored evidence, but would not be able to touch the archived data unless he had the relevant permissions. This protects both you and your other employees as you can maintain the integrity of your data, and the reputation of your business.