Security of contractually important emails

Will Yandell, Director at Union Square Software discusses the management and retention of contractually important email, a growing problem to the whole of UK business.

The construction industry has been singled out by particularly strong legislation which means that all correspondence - including email - must be retained for up to 15 years.

With many contractual details now being routinely agreed and confirmed in email messages, the pressure is on the directors of any organisation involved in the construction sector to consider carefully the legal responsibilities for looking after, and being able to produce, full email audit trails for more than a decade after an email was first sent.

At the moment, most construction firms rely on Microsoft Outlook to archive email - yet it was never designed for this.

Outlook is a distribution system not a filing system.

However, there is a viable alternative.

The use of vaulting technology provides construction companies with secure and seamless management of email, by capturing all incoming and outgoing email and storing it securely within the project context in a central location.

While a copy may also reside in a personal email box, it doesn't languish there inaccessible to other team members or potentially lost when a member of the team moves on.

Even if the original email is deleted by its originator or recipient, a copy complete with its audit trail, remains securely within the vault, providing that essential, valuable and complete documentation set that meets legal requirements and can be easily produced in the case of a dispute.

In today's litigious climate, construction companies that fail to keep a tight control of contractually important email will simply be unable to defend themselves in a legal dispute.

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