This is what happens when you think it through for yourself

In a Smartbiz article, Brian Murphy discusses the five most common email-management mistakes that businesses are making today:

1. Believing it is feasible to run your business without some form of email-management system.

2. Destroying email by auto purges or mailbox caps. This contravenes record-keeping policies and obligations across many legal compliance and business risk-management fronts.

3. Using backups as an archive. The problem with this approach is that un-indexed email records are difficult and expensive to search, especially when the request for such records is typically mission- or business-risk-critical.

4. Assuming that existing document-management systems are an acceptable technology to handle email archiving. The volume and indexing challenges for email archiving across an enterprise are substantially different from standard document-management challenges.

5. Implementing an email retention policy that was optimized for paper. Email is not paper. The classification processes used for paper simply don't work with email because:

• The sheer volume of email exchanged makes it impractical to classify everything;
• Everyone uses email;
• The administration of email isn't easily delegated, and
• There's an almost infinite number of possible classification criteria, making it impractical for end users to classify all of their messages.