I've been sending emails for a long time -- I even created a primitive email system for domestic and international use inside the multi-national company where I was IT Director in the 1970s. We had interactive terminals in all our locations so my system could deliver messages within seconds, which was much better than the multi-hour timeframe when using the company's telex-based system. So I'm a big believer in email. My primitive system had very little capability when it came to retrieving previously sent messages -- it was so good at delivery and made the users so happy that I didn't put much concern into retrieval.

Times have certainly changed -- email is now the standard method for communication in organizations. A report issued by Hitwise in March 2009 indicates that more than 2 billion email messages are sent every day. This is a vast amount of traffic. It has become the life force of every organization and it is acknowledged as such by most managements. But there is a hidden underside to all these messages -- how are they maintained after they are sent and received? 

Where do old emails live, or do they die?

I recently worked at a company which used Exchange as their email server and we used Outlook to work our email. Things mostly were OK but every now and then people would complain that they couldn't find old (or not so old) emails in their inbox or folders. It turned out that the admins were allocating 2-gig per person as the online email storage limit. 2-gig may sound like a lot of storage, and it is certainly a lot if you are sending only text-based messages, but when your mail contains multi-megabyte attachments it can fill up pretty quickly. As example, say you send and receive 20-meg each workday (which isn't really all that much) -- you'll fill up your 2-gig allotment in 100 days and that isn't very long. 

Sometimes I would search for old emails in my Outlook and not find them -- I assumed it was because I wasn't remembering the keywords properly. Then I learned about the 2-gig limit they had imposed for online storage, and that older messages were effectively out of my ability to retrieve. Exchange deleted old messages to prevent from exceeding the limit. (The company did have tape backups, so if they had a pressing need such as a lawsuit and simply had to access older messages it was possible, but it was so impractical as to be impossible for daily operational use.) The process of restoring old messages from the backup is very tedious and takes effort on the part of the IT staff. 

So the effective answer to the question of  Where do old emails live, or do they die?   is that they die in most organizations, and this is a very bad answer because the information contained in those emails is priceless to the organization. 

Stay tuned to my next blog to find out how you can keep older emails online without great cost or burden on your IT department, and at the same time get advanced query capabilities which are more powerful and easier to use than those provided by Outlook.

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