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Expert Insight: Making Sense of Email Managment

Few businesses today could survive without their email systems, and most firms have to handle tens, even hundreds of thousands of messages each day, making email a top priority for both storage managers and their CIOs.

Making sense of all this information, however, is easier said than done. Users, for example, are being forced to do more and more with this ever-growing email mountain, from e-discovery in the event of a legal dispute, to archiving and managing the emails over periods of months or even years.

To make matters worse, some vendors are actually making this complex scenario even more difficult for users to fathom.

Cut Through the Vendor Spiel

No one, for example, really agrees on what EAM (Email Archiving and Management) is, and the various definitions bandied about dont really help technology buyers very much. But, even at a basic level, all EAM systems do not do the same things:

  • Some focus on removing mail from the email servers
  • Others specialize in filtering and removing junk or useless mail
  • Others concentrate on building and maintaining a copy of the mail environment so that it can be backed up if all else fails
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