Save That Mail

Computerworld - Tens of thousands of e-mails pass through the offices of Friedman, Billings, Ramsey Group Inc. every month.

The Arlington, Va.-based financial services holding firm had stored e-mails on tape, but CIO Jerry Carlsen recently was given the task of upgrading that storage system to one that has the ability to index and archive e-mails.

So Carlsen dedicated 60 hours of his IT staff's time each week for four months to work with SJ Technologies LLC, a global systems integrator in Phoenix, to develop the new e-mail storage system. The system required six new servers and uses EmailXtender software from Legato Systems Inc. Carlsen is still assessing what the best storage media will be.

With new hardware and software in place, Friedman, Billings, Ramsey has a system that's capable of storing and indexing e-mails from 450 employees at 16 locations worldwide. Now if employees or regulators want to retrieve an e-mail, they can use the date, user, topic or other identifiers to find it.

Credit: Gina Triplett

Consider this: Securities regulators recently fined five Wall Street firms—Goldman Sachs & Co., Salomon Smith Barney Inc., Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank Securities Inc. and Piper Jaffray Inc.—a total of $8.25 million for not keeping certain e-mails for the required period of time . Regulators said the five firms violated securities rules by failing "to preserve for three years, and/or to preserve in an accessible place for two years" such office memoranda as e-mails related to their exchange, brokerage or dealer businesses.

Companies must follow legal and regulatory requirements that dictate what records to keep and for how long. These rules generally don't speak to the media on which those records originated; instead, they usually apply to all records, whether they're papers, e-mails or electronic attachments.

Brokerages often have the tightest regulations when it comes to archiving records, experts say. For example, the Securities and Exchange Commission requires that they keep securities transactions for seven years. But brokerages aren't the only ones working under record-keeping requirements. Lenders must keep Home Mortgage Disclosure Applications—whether on paper or in e-mail—for three years. Human resources departments must keep personnel records, including e-mailed applications and responses to job ads, for one year from the date of personnel action.

"It's a technology nightmare, and it's going to get worse as the years go on and the e-mails build up," says Mark E. Schreiber, a partner in the labor and employment department at Boston law firm Palmer & Dodge LLP.