Note: Red circles were added for clarity.

In this example, the IT-related goal is to minimize the amount of corporate resources dedicated to non-work related e-mail while still giving end users a lot of control over their own inboxes.

While this approach is no panacea, it is a way of encouraging good user behavior. For instance, I know many of us (myself included) take the following approach to managing our mailbox quotas: Sort the inbox by mail size and delete the largest items without regard to corporate retention policy. Folder quotas are a more precise tool to help IT departments manage storage costs while reducing the impact on corporate retention policy.

Now I’d like to switch gears and describe a policy related to managed folders than many readers of this blog have been waiting for: sending e-mail to a records repository. Any managed folder can be configured such that all e-mail sent to that folder will be journaled off to a records repository, such as a SharePoint Records Center.

What does this mean? E-mail messages and their attachments are sent off to SharePoint along with an extract of their metadata (e.g. From, To, CC, BCC, Subject). They are then passed through the same

Organizations can choose how often they want to collect the metadata, and it’s really dependent on the individual business process. Highly regulated organizations with lots of records may send out the e-mail reminders often. Other companies may ask their employees to spend a few minutes on Friday updating the metadata for the e-mail records submitted that week.

Getting users to enter metadata is always a challenge in any records management project, especially e-mail. We’ve designed this process to minimize the impact on the user’s everyday work and to make the bulk entering of metadata as easy as possible.

Of course, if there is no need to collect extra metadata, the email message is sent to the correct document library without any further user intervention.

So that concludes our 4-part tour of e-mail records management. As always, keep the questions and comments coming. We only hit the tip of the iceberg with regards to Exchange 2007’s compliance features. I encourage you to check out a couple Exchange blog posts (

In my previous post, I described how organizations can define a set of e-mail classifications (i.e. managed folders) and how end users can use those folders to classify content. In this post, I’ll describe one of the main uses of this classification system: e-mail retention policie