What Is in-Place Email Analytics in Email Archiving and Why Is It Important

A typical person sends and receives over 120 emails each day, implying that a modest company of 100 people will handle around 12,000 emails daily. Then again, large corporations often have hundreds of thousands of people regularly sending staggering quantities of emails. In fact, according to Statista, there were over 4 billion active email users in 2020 who collectively sent and received 300 billion emails per day. This implies that emails are a vital element of the digital workspace, be it a government organization, a corporate entity, a university, or a non-profit. However, with ease of use, accessibility, and familiarity comes challenges.

Inadequate email records for litigation or other legal concerns, and the difficulty in obtaining crucial email communications if they have been mistakenly deleted. As well as a slow server and the difficulty preparing for any prospective eDiscovery demands are a few of the challenges that come with a large volume of unmanaged emails. But by far, the biggest challenges that an organization faces with emails in with compliance and analytics.

Compliance Regulations

Financial documents, email correspondence between organizations, employee records, invoices, shipping information, and even metadata may be subject to the email archiving rules. These regulations often require organizations to collect, monitor, retain and produce these records on demand. Furthermore, in a legal dispute, the compliance team must search for and retrieve data from its entire email stock efficiently and quickly. Some other obligations for corporations dealing with emails and other forms of electronic communication channels are:

• GDPR: The General Data Protection Regulation of the European Union demands a lawful, fair, and transparent processing of the EU citizen data within and outside the EU.

• CCPA: The California Consumer Protection Act demands organizations to maintain thorough documentation of the data they are gathering, including how it's used, where it's stored, and who's in charge of it, and has a statutory damages framework for companies that misuse or sells users' personal data.

• HIPAA: The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act provides standards to secure individuals' medical records and other personal health information, including electronic health care transactions.

• FINRA: The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority member firms have a significant obligation to protect financial and personal client information.

All these regulations and requirements might be daunting at first, but if your company utilizes email for internal and external communications, your mail server is probably home to hundreds of unmanaged emails that could be violating any of these regulations. It might be troublesome to have too many emails on an email server and might become extremely slow or completely unavailable. Therefore, it is always advised to follow the footsteps of the National Archives and Records Administration and archive emails to minimize mail server overload and other risks related to it.

Email Management and Analysis

But archiving is a step toward better email management. A company that strives to succeed and grow must also analyze what's inside these emails based on their content and metadata and use it to enhance organizational operations. By using in-place email management, companies can capture emails from the servers, make use of comprehensive and multi-keyword search, find redundant, obsolete, and trivial (ROT) data, remediate sensitive data, act upon them, and much more.

For example, when an email or messaging server delivers or receives data, log files that contain information on the sender, the recipient, the time of delivery or receipt, the subject line, the size of the attachment, and, depending on the server, the name of the attachment and message content can be derived. All this knowledge obtained from the corporate emails could be used to:

Reduce the cost of bandwidth

Examine bandwidth consumption and determine whether employees are downloading excessive amounts of data from specific websites and specific files.

Safeguard Confidential Information

To prevent the transmission of secret corporate information, keep an eye on email and instant messaging activities.

Reduce Litigation Risks

Ensure compliance with statutes and laws pertaining to Internet usage to reduce the possibility of costly liabilities and legal concerns.

Provide Better Customer Services

Emails contain communications with the customers that can be used to understand customer behavior, make predictions, train employees, and create better customer-targeted marketing campaigns.

Increase Employee Satisfaction

Since employees are an integral part of any organization, email communications could be used to understand employee behavior, create better training programs, and much more to increase employee satisfaction.

Increase the Effectiveness of Your Email Virus Protection

To find the source of infections, examine log data from email virus detection software or devices. Determine who sent the virus, who got it, the attachment's name, and how your virus scanner handled it.

Conclusion

Archiving emails and analyzing them for increasing growth is the need of the hour, but the end goal varies from business to business. Hence, companies must research and understand their organizational needs and goals before opting for a solution. But, regardless of the end goals and requirements, an email archiving software must be capable of providing business analytics, email and data archiving solutions, and information governance solution to start with.