Over the past several years e-mail has really become a way of life for almost everyone. We all know people that do not do e-mail, but that is really not as common as it once was. Along with that is the fact that we now all send attachments with our e-mail that include documents, photos, and even video clips on a fairly regular basis. That is today. And to better prepare for the tomorrow's that are becoming more and more advanced we must start to do a better job of managing the e-mail resources we have in place today. We have allowed users to keep all the e-mail they receive in an active state and we are not getting close to the point where that is not an affordable option. That brings us to depend on the e-mail archive process to maintain the integrity of our older e-mail.
E-mail archiving is the process of moving older e-mail out of active status and into an archive status. The process may serve as a backup for all of the users individual e-mail within the realm of that users account. It can also be selective and just archive segments. How that happens is done is up to the user by establishing rules for the archiving process. The process if far too lengthy to discuss in an e-mail. We have recently completed some e-mail archive training sessions in the TRC (Technology Resource Center) and they were quite well attended. We are planning to do a great deal more of the archive training in March, April, and May. Soon we will distribute a training schedule to help you plan.
June 1, 2007 is a date you may want to keep in mind. As we try to manage our e-mail resources better we are going to start limiting the time we keep e-mail active on the system. Hence the reason for the e-mail archive training. We are going to only keep 18 months of e-mail active. The process of deleting e-mails on the mail server will start on June 1, 2007. It will gradually happen as we do not want to labor the server so that using the e-mail system will be grudgingly slow. It may take 30 days to eliminate all of the e-mail that is older than 18 months.
We encourage each of you to attend a training session in a timely fashion so that you can archive your older e-mail if that is something you feel is important.
Thank you for your kind understanding,
Dennis Linster
