C2C Survey Finds E-Mail Searches on the Increase
75 Percent of Organizations Need to Locate Hidden E-mails

20th April 2005

E-mails can hide anywhere —Exchange folders, Information Stores, public folders, personal storage (PST) files, trash/recycle bins and remote laptops. But C2C’s Active Folders can quickly and efficiently search live email records to help organizations with forensic electronic evidence discovery and meet Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) search requests.

According to a March 2005 survey by C2C’s Archive One division and Osterman Research, during the past three years 75 percent of IT departments have been required to search through backup tapes and local message stores to retrieve one or more emails in response to a request from the legal department or human resources. Respondents stated that 62.3 percent of users store information in local message stores, such as a local hard disk.

“The requirements were for instant retrieval of any email message from the data store within one day,” says Steven Kieffer, senior network analyst at Schreiber Foods, Inc. “A business requirement came up shortly after the purchase of Active Folders that demanded email messages be found containing key words. Active Folders was able to extract the messages within hours.”

If there’s a legal request for information and a company hasn’t begun to archive email yet, a search by Active Folders will save time and money. There’s no need to retroactively archive email stores, a process that can take months or even years. Active Folders’ search engine can analyze 1,600 messages per second.

“E-mail is unstructured data — messages have many formats and the information is not pre-indexed for fast, centralized searches across all users and data stores. Copy significant to a FOIA or legal discovery request can be in the subject line or email body, even hidden in attachments or in embedded emails,” says Dave Hunt, CEO of C2C. “Active Folders finds it all. Nearly 50 criteria can be combined to perform searches down to the most granular level — from the most obvious use of dates to the most obscure terms hidden in an attachment. Not only will you find out what is stored, but who is storing it.”

Legal & Privacy