Tough stance on e-mail compliance

New legislation will be forcing companies to retain e-mails as a legal record, and companies which do not comply, will be faced with hefty fines.

John Giles, partner at Michalsons attorneys, says: “The Protection of Personal Information Bill, due in March, will have an impact in the way businesses protect confidential information. This is going to have a big impact on e-mail because it processes personal information.

“The law requires companies to retain invoices and if that invoice is in an e-mail or attached to an email; the email needs to be retained, and a lot of companies are not doing that.”

According to Giles, by managing e-mails properly, companies will be able to automatically migrate their e-mails to other storage media; making their e-mail servers more efficient and boosting productivity. In addition, companies can make their e-mail system serve as an organisational knowledge store, allowing users to mine data.

Giles claims that under King III, the board is responsible for the company's compliance with e-mail laws. He says that the board should ensure that the company implements an effective compliance framework and processes to ensure compliance with e-mail laws.

Giles notes that many companies are concluding agreements on e-mail, without even knowing it. He suggests that organisations tend to take a slack approach over e-mail, with a perception that a paper record is more legally binding than an e-mail, but this is not always the case.

“People aren't aware that you can conclude an important binding contract via e-mail,” says Giles, “In order to manage business risks effectively, you need to know the rules of the game. In order to perform effectively, a business needs to know what the laws are.”

Jay Bradley, managing director of the ProData Group, says that ProData recently rolled out its Mirapoint appliance-based product which addresses the challenges around e-mail archiving.

According to Bradley, Mirapoint controls 33% of the e-mail archival appliance world market: “Acquiring the distribution of Mirapoint was a natural progression for us to drive an e-mail archiving platform. Mirapoint allows people to do what they are supposed instead of spending a lot of their day managing email.

“We've been looking at the archive space for the last four to five years, and trying to advise our customers and resellers about the legal implications around e-mail archiving, and people are becoming more aware.”