It is my opinion that email archiving is about to become a requirement for all financial institutions.

The regulators often times do not look into how long an institution is keeping their emails. Their main concerns are standard backup scenarios. [tag]Tapes[/tag], DVDs, NAS devices, whatever…as long as everything gets backed up, they don’t drill down. But there is more to it than that. Everybody can see that emailing has gone from a business feature of 5 years ago to a business requirement today. Some business just couldn’t function without it… I know ours would be affected substantially. And those emails hold some very important information that financial institutions are going to need to be able to retrieve.
With email servers, most systems place caps as to how much will be stored on their servers and if emails fill to that cap then the oldest emails gets purged.

This is going to have to change.

Emails are already being used as legal evidence in court cases, to handle employee dispute issues, or to protect the institution from fraudlent activities and we need to start holding on to those emails and creating policies and procedures for how it will be handle from now on.