Software Helps Schools Sort Through Spam

In the Dallas suburb of Mesquite — whose motto is Real. Texas. Flavor. — Dennis Hevron faced a Real. Big. Problem. E-mail, and lots of it.

As director of technical services for the Mesquite Independent School District, Hevron had to figure out what to do with the 60,000 messages that made it through the district’s spam filter each day.

Once upon a time, Hevron’s job was much easier. If there was too much e-mail, he simply deleted it. Then in 2006, revisions to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure put businesses, governments and schools on notice that in the event of litigation, they might be required to hand over, among other types of electronic documents, pertinent e-mail from years past. But which messages? The federal law left that decision largely to the states, which left it to local school districts, which left it to users.

The result: Like school districts nationwide, Mesquite — which has 4,600 e-mail accounts — began hoarding every message it received until mail servers were overloaded and delivery slowed to a crawl. And forget about finding specific missives in a pinch — say, during a lawsuit — because locating individual messages was nearly impossible.

Lessening the Burden

Last August, Hevron began moving mounds of e-mail off the district’s 700 gigabyte central mail server and onto an 8 terabyte archive server running Symantec Enterprise Vault. “It took an enormous load off the Microsoft Exchange server, and I didn’t have to expand the central server to accommodate the mail,” Hevron says.

Mesquite ISD has established an e-mail retention policy and is working on mail system rules to enforce those policies. Under district guidelines, e-mail is moved from a mail server to an archive server after 30 days. How long a message stays there depends on its type: Administrative correspondence must be kept for at least three years, and general correspondence for at least one year. E-mail deleted by users resides elsewhere in the system for 30 days before it is purged entirely.

Mesquite school officials decide what e-mail should be considered official business. To complicate this process, the 2008 Texas Public Information Handbook published by the state attorney general’s office warns public officials that “the attorney general has determined in several informal letter rulings that e-mail correspondence in personal e-mail accounts can sometimes be subject to the [Public Information] Act.”

If the e-mail has been classified as an official record, e-mail that refers to a student’s performance or health would be covered by the state’s records-retention schedules. In Texas, schools are required to retain accident reports for five years and correspondence with parents for two years. “There are lots of rules and regulations,” says Hevron. “It gets pretty convoluted, so we leave it up to the users to classify whether something is a health record or something else. It’s hard for IT directors to make these decisions.”

Lara Farrar, MIS/WAN specialist at Chapel Hill–Carrboro (N.C.) City Schools, agrees: “We have all types of documents that are attached to e-mail. Some, like vehicle maintenance records, you’re supposed to keep for 30 years.”

That’s why the school district, which deployed an e-mail archiving system in April, doesn’t delete any e-mail — at least, not yet. “Right now, the policy is to archive everything for two years,” says Farrar. “But we’ve just begun this. So between now and two years from now, we’ll decide whether to keep everything or not.”

Making the Right Choice

For IT, deciding on an e-mail archiving system is easier than deciding what e-mail to keep. Here are some of the features that typically factor into the selection process:

• Storage: Archiving software can compress data and block files based on size or format. There are other optimization tricks, as well. Trend Micro Message Archiver, for example, lets systems administrators reduce data storage by using a process called single-instance storage (also known as data de-duplication or intelligent compression). It’s a method of reducing storage by eliminating duplicate data; for example, an attachment that is sent to multiple message recipients would be stored once.
• Search capability: With huge volumes of archived information, sysadmins need to be able to search not only for a particular item, but also all related items, regardless of their format (for example, whether a message was sent as an instant message or an e-mail).

  An important function of archiving is the ability to classify e-mail, either manually or automatically, for later retrieval. “One of the biggest benefits is that users can clean out their mailboxes and search for things on the archive as they need them,” says Alan Benezra, network administrator for the Montclair (N.J.) Board of Education. “The search capa­bilities of GFI MailArchiver are great.”

  The school district receives about 50,000 e-mail messages, including spam, each day, he says. After filtering, only 5,000 legitimate messages are archived and sent to users’ mailboxes.

• Policy-based archiving: Some applications let users classify e-mail; others provide automated rules that sort and file messages. Some applications, such as Symantec Enterprise Vault, also can be configured to discard irrelevant e-mail and thus reduce volume.
• Data protection: Sysadmins can quickly suspend the destruction of archived data in response to internal investigations, litigation or electronic-discovery requests. That includes data in e-mail, instant messages, files or shared documents.
• Compatibility: One of the first features IT shops look for is compatibility with existing e-mail servers and software, most often Microsoft Outlook and Exchange Server.

How well the archiving software manages .pst (Personal Storage Table) files, particularly damaged .pst files, is also important. Exchange and Outlook users can create their own local repositories using .pst files. GFI MailArchiver, for example, flags .pst files as they are exported, so that they are not extracted and archived more than once.

“There are different reasons to archive,” says Mesquite ISD’s Hevron. “My school administration wants to do it for legal reasons. I want to do it to make room on the mail server. Either way, it gives us more breathing room.”