Should You Delete or Archive Email? (2024)

To delete or archive email is a question that bothers many organizations, especially the ones that do not have a lot of experience with stringent laws that dictate the need to preserve all business records.

This article is a good place to start if you’ve never archived email before and are not sure whether you need to archive email at all or if you can simply delete them.

To help you get started, today we’re going to look at:

• What email archiving is and how it can help you manage records
• The reasons behind email archiving
• Concerns regarding storage capacity vs archived emails
• What happens when you archive an email
• Pros and cons of deleting emails.

Let’s get started.

By default, most people delete rather than archive their email. If you ask someone why they delete email, they will most likely tell you that they delete them because they want to manage their email and keep it organized or reduce mailbox clutter.

Should You Delete Emails (and When)?

The original reason why we’re even given the option to delete emails is simple – there’s limited storage space to keep them. However, it would be more accurate to say that there used to be limited storage space to store them.

But in 2020, having enough space to hold all of our emails is no longer an issue.

Gmail alone gives its users over 15 gigabytes of storage space before their inbox gets full. That’s enough room for 4 full length, 1080p movies.

In other words, if you use your email like most of us do – to store text-based messages along with some small attachments – you will have to work very hard to fill your email account.

Even after the introduction of folder structure, which allows us to organize and save important emails in specific locations for later use, there are still some emails we feel pressured to delete.

When you delete an email, it gets moved to a trash folder, where it usually gets deleted after a period of time automatically (eg. in Gmail, this period is 30 days) and is no longer accessible or retrievable.

And another thing to bear in mind here is the storage space issue–when you move emails to a trash folder, they will still continue to take up space until you empty the trash folder.

What about double-deletion of emails?

Double-deletion is when you delete an email message from your inbox and then immediately delete it from the trash folder as well.

To many people, double-deletion of email is an everyday occurrence as some organizations still impose mailbox size limits to stop employee mailboxes from getting out of hand and causing performance issues on the email system.

But a recent lawsuit threw a curve ball at this when it came to light that certain employees tried to cover up illicit communications by instructing each other to double-delete the emails in question.

The lawsuit was based around the allegation that they “took steps to conceal their communications with one another” by hard deleting the incriminatory emails.

The crazy thing about this is that double deletion of emails is not illegal as long as there’s no duty or regulation to preserve it.

But once a duty, notification of impending litigation or an audit is anticipated or received, organizations are legally required to keep all their electronically stored information in a format that ensures data integrity.

In summary, although double-deletion may not always be illegal, there is a definite grey area that can lead to major ramifications if litigation arises.
Other, more recent examples of how technology can be abused include employees who conspired, gossiped and planned embezzlement through email drafts or vanishing instagram messages.

What Is the Solution To Managing Your Email Database?

To recap, deleting is simply not an option?

What if the inbox we’re talking about is your company inbox where you receive all kinds of business-critical information that you often need to refer to or that mustn’t be compromised in any way?

What if you work in a public company that must maintain compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley and preserve all digital communications (email included) for 5 or more years?

In these cases, as tempting as email deletion seems, it’s safer and more cost-effective to archive emails because it gives you the freedom to remove emails off your system without the risk of breaking any compliance laws.

What Is Email Archiving?

Email archiving is the automated process during which all incoming, outgoing and internal emails in an organization are captured, indexed, deduplicated and archived either in a cloud environment or on an in-house appliance.

Email archiving was originally used for compliance and storage management purposes, but is now viewed as a fundamental part of corporate information governance and electronic records management.

What Is Email Archiving Used For?

In short, email archiving is used for preserving your emails and helping you manage your records in a more efficient way.

This means that with email archiving you can:

• respond faster to ediscovery requests in investigation or litigation cases
• recover lost or deleted emails,
• shorten the time for audit response,
• preserve the intellectual property contained in the emails
• optimize storage capacity of your server
• ensure email backup in case of a disaster, thus ensuring continuity of your business
• monitor internal and external communication
• allow authorized users to set legal hold tags
• set custom retention and purge policies

Email archiving is the perfect way to deal with emails containing private and sensitive information.

Why Should You Archive Email?

There are several reasons for archiving emails:

• Stay compliant with federal and industry-specific regulations.
• Protect your business in potential legal actions.
• Preserve server space.
• Keep your email data organized.
• Have access to all business records at any given time.
• Minimize the risk and liabilities that can arise from poor records management.

In some cases, companies are required by law to retain their emails (being that emails are regarded as official business records) for a certain period of time.

Depending on the industry you work in, this retention period can vary. For example, under FERPA, schools need to preserve their emails for 5 years, whereas in healthcare, all information subject to HIPAA must be retained for 7 years.

However, you can choose to keep your emails in the archive for longer than prescribed by law.

On the one hand, this might be a good decision because a longer retention period will ensure business continuity and allow you to rely on old emails to decipher past business decisions.

On the other hand, the longer you keep your emails in the archive, the bigger the risk that someone might jeopardize them. And also, if you keep your emails in the archive for longer than required, you increase the chances of being caught up in a legal investigation that you could have otherwise avoided legally.

What Happens When You Archive an Email?

So what does email archive mean in practice and what happens to archived emails?

Once you set up archiving in your company, each email that is sent or received by someone in your organization, along with all its metadata (sender, date and time, recipient, information on attachment, attachment itself) is captured.

It can either be captured directly from the content of the email (which is a process called journaling) or during the message transit.

Once the entire content of the email is captured, it gets indexed. Indexing is a process during which all the content of a message is “broken down” against a set of criteria and then stored in the archive, so that all the information is preserved in a smarter, and more accessible way. This works the same way you index all the books in a library (eg. according to period, writer, country, genre, etc.)

By breaking down the content of each message, indexing makes all messages and attachments searchable. This comes in handy not only when employees need to find a particular email quickly, but also in case of pending litigation, when relevant emails need to be located, put on legal hold and presented as evidence within a specified time frame.

After the messages are indexed, they get stored securely in an impenetrable, tamper-proof vault that only admins, compliance officers and other privileged users can access and manage. All messages get time and date-stamped in order to preserve data integrity and prevent evidence spoliation.

And since most archiving software these days come with advanced search capabilities, you can now search through millions of archived emails and locate the critical one in just seconds.

With advanced search, you can look for an email using a set of various criteria, based on content in body, sender or recipient fields, as well as in the attachment, or by running a search for an email using a particular phrase.

Unlike what happens when you delete an email and it is lost forever, archiving gives you the option of rediscovering them.

Will Emails in Archive Be Deleted?

No. When you archive emails, they will only be moved from your inbox to your archive, which you can access at any point. This is done in near real time, and is a neat way to organize your inbox, but still preserve all relevant documents that you can easily retrieve and export into a variety of formats at any later point.

You’ll then be able to delete the emails from your inbox without worrying whether you’ll be able to retrieve them in case you need to refer to anything later.

How Long Do Emails Stay in the Archive?

As long as you need them to. Again, the period for which you preserve your records depends on the purpose of the records. Depending on which archiver you use, you can set custom retention periods and keep the emails for as long as you want.

Think of it this way. After a project is finished, you might think that you’ll never need to view a particular email again.

But what if a similar project comes up and you need a glance at the previous one?

We always hope for the best, but what if your company gets sued in relation to this project and all communication detailing its implementation needs to be presented as evidence in court?

It could cost your company money and reputation to go searching for an email that can save your business and then come to the realization that you deleted it a year ago.

Here is a list of most retention periods by industry, as prescribed by relevant regulations:

Some email archiving systems let you create an unlimited number of retention policies, so you can choose to assign different retention periods with a lot of flexibility – for example, you could choose to keep C-level executives’ emails, employment contracts and financial reports indefinitely, while discarding HR email records after 7 years, intern records after 1 year and so on.

Who Should Be Archiving Emails?

Email archiving may be considered niche in some industries, but it’s justified to say it’s a matter of time before technology advancements start requiring other industries to accept and start archiving email.

This reasoning is grounded in the fact that both the volume and formats of data are going up, year after year. At the same time, most of these data types are regarded as official business records, so companies will be legally required to preserve them for reference.

Meanwhile, there are some industries like government and education that have been archiving emails for years now.

In this short video, our VP Business Development, Jeff Marlow, speaks about which industries should archive email:

So, now that we’ve looked at both email archiving and deleting, let’s sum it up.

• Deleting removes emails from your inbox. It does save up space, but you won’t be able to retrieve those emails ever again. This puts you at risk both in financial and legal terms. You won’t be able to produce evidence for ediscovery and litigation. You also risk being in breach of records management regulations, and fines are by no means small (five Wall Street brokerages had to pay $8.25 million because they had discarded email related to customer transactions.)
• Archiving also saves up storage space, by capturing and storing emails in an archive (either an on-premise archiving solution or a modern cloud archiving solution). However, archiving also indexes and stores your emails in a smart, efficient way, allowing you to quickly find any email via a variety of search criteria.
• Archiving goes beyond just email management. It also allows you to monitor your communication channels and see if your employees violate any communication policies (eg. you can set keywords lists that would monitor channels for any kind of profanity and send early warning signals).
• Archiving refers not only to emails, but to electronic records in various forms. You can archive text, voice calls, social media, WhatsApp messages, and more. This is important, as all this content constitutes official business records.

Get all the benefits of email archiving and stay compliant with Jatheon. Jatheon Cloud is the best data archiving solution for regulated industries helping you safeguard and easily retrieve crucial information.

FAQ

Is it better to archive or delete emails?

In most cases archiving emails will be a better option as all the data contained within them will remain accessible. This allows you to have a cleaner database with the ability to find old emails when they are needed. Deleting emails would be useful for when the emails at hand are of no use to your business and their retention period expires.

How often should you archive emails?

The frequency at which emails should be archived depends on your organization’s policies, compliance requirements, and the volume of emails being received/sent. It is recommended to archive your emails regularly, in most instances daily is the best option. Regular archiving will minimize the risk of lost data and keep the database up-to-date.

Which emails take up storage?

Every email takes a certain amount of space, but how much they take up depends on their content. Text based emails take the least amount of space while emails with attachments, images, video, or files take significantly more space. Email threads can also take up a lot of space if the conversation is lengthy and multiple files are forwarded throughout the conversation.

Does archiving emails save space?

Yes, archiving emails will save space in your primary inbox/database. When archiving, your emails are moved and stored in a separate database on your archiving service provider’s servers. This removes the emails from your server while still being able to access them. However, archiving emails doesn’t delete them, it just moves them to another server, so they are still taking up space somewhere else, but it lets you have more storage space on your machines.

Should you archive all emails?

It is best to archive all of your emails to ensure a comprehensive record of communication and keep your organization compliant. Archiving everything will protect critical data and retain the context of all communication as you can’t predict which email will be crucial in legal or auditing purposes.

How do I clean up thousands of emails?

One option is deleting these emails, but in doing this you will be losing critical information you may need in the future. A better way is archiving these emails. Archived emails free up space, but they remain easily accessible, providing a comprehensive record of past communications and facilitating quick retrieval and can be organized into different categories.

Jatheon is an archiving pioneer specializing in archiving business records for regulated industries. If you’re looking for a comprehensive archiving solution, check out how our on-premise email archiving can help you ensure full compliance and preserve all business records.