The gist is that email archiving can be an incredibly useful tool to manage legal risks and enable more effective discovery of message content. Electronic discovery is growing at an amazing clip, and most cases now include email messages – in fact, email is estimated to be 60% to 70% of all legal discovery in the United States today!

At the same time, companies are challenged with ineffective or un-enforced retention and litigation hold policies and rampant “underground archiving” of messages in offline PST files. And to make matters worse, the 2006 revisions to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure drastically shortened the amount of time companies have to describe and produce electronic records! It’s simply impossible to begin recovering messages from backup tapes in response to legal requests – the only way forward is a proactive strategy based on email archiving.

If this piques your interest, grab a copy of that whitepaper, join me on Wednesday for the webinar, and check out some of my other email-related content. I’ll also be speaking on the topic at Storage Decisions in San Francisco, and would be happy to respond to your emailed questions any time!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2008. | Six Critical Steps For Managing Email E-Discovery
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Personal. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

Although my email archiving session always attracts a smaller crowd, they are all a dedicated bunch. One pertinent suggestion from an attendee was to ingest PST files into a special separate archive in order to ensure that messages recovered from it are treated with the proper skepticism. Questions after the session focused on the trick of engaging legal and business people in the decisions around email policy, truly a challenge. I suggested that an on-site mini-seminar for the relevant folks might help to break the logjam and illustrate the issues, something that I would be happy to arrange!

My storage virtualization session was once again placed in the main room, and a much larger group attended it. I was interested to hear just how great the impact of VMware’s VDC-OS had been. In just a week, a dozen or more folks in the audience had heard, comprehended, and strategized about the concept. It’s really that big! Others were very interested in the topic of green metrics for data center usage. How does one monitor and report the real “green” savings (power, carbon, cooling, space) for a virtualized environment? Although storage greenness is debatable, the savings from a virtualized server environment are real, and these often bundle in some of the storage numbers, too.

These topics are top of mind to me as well, and I will continue to investigate (and speculate) about them in the coming year. If you missed the show (or the handouts), I will be posting them here soon! Get my email address or head to LinkedIn by clicking the links in the sidebar (at top left).

Watch this space, and consider coming to my virtualization seminar in Charlotte on October 21 or to the Storage Decisions show in San Francisco, held November 17 to 19.

See my posts on Gestalt IT for similar enterprise IT infrastructure commentary

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2008. | Storage Decisions New York 2008 Feedback
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Personal, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

I love that Gmail keeps all of my email online and easily searchable – when I need to locate some old bit of information, I can usually find it by typing a couple of words into the Gmail search box, no matter where I am. Since I travel a lot, I’ll often log into Gmail from my work laptop, a hotel PC, or my iPhone just for this purpose.

But the other day, I remembered a message my dad sent me a few years ago and wanted to look it up. I was stuck, though, because the message was sitting in a PST on my (powered-off) desktop back at home. I was able to get to it from my laptop through a complicated process that involved ssh, my Tomato-powered router, wake-on-LAN, and remote desktop… Not something I wanted to go through again!

I got thinking that I’d love to have all of my mail in Gmail – even those messages from before I started using it. Turns out, lots of people were thinking about this way back when, but it’s always been difficult to import mail into Gmail, and lots of folks think it still is. But I found that, thanks to Gmail’s new IMAP feature, it’s now super easy to get your PST (and Thunderbird, etc) mail into Gmail! Read on for how I did it, and how you can too!

It used to be pretty difficult to get messages into Gmail, and most solutions revolved around re-mailing old messages to your new Gmail account, or having Gmail access a POP server and import messages for you. Neither of these effectively solved the problem of mail stored in Outlook PST files, though. If you had a PST, you needed to extract them into a standard format and (try to) use a Gmail mailer like GML to import them. This may work for you, but it didn’t work for me and I don’t suggest it.

The new (functional) method I used simply uses Outlook to move messages in bulk over an IMAP connection. IMAP lets the Outlook directly access folders on a remote mail server for drag and drop mail operations, and this is the functionality we’re leveraging with Gmail.

Gmail doesn’t have folders, of course, but it spoofs them with labels. So when you access a Gmail account with an IMAP server, your labels show up as folders, and when you drop a message into one of these “folders”, it simply gets that label in Gmail. Note that it does not get an “Inbox” label, however, so you won’t see the message in the Inbox, only when you click on the label or search with the search box. But this works pretty well, and allows you to neatly label old messages as being non-Gmail, which might be helpful.

So let’s say you’re using some version of Outlook (or Outlook Express). Here’s what to do:

1. Enable IMAP in your Gmail account settings
2. Configure Outlook to access Gmail per Google’s directions
3. Once you connect to Gmail’s IMAP, you should see all of your labels show up as folders – this is key!
4. In your Gmail account, create a new label for your migrated email – I called it “Old Mail”, clever eh?
5. Now just select all of the messages in each PST folder (control-A is your friend) and drag and drop them on the folder/label you just created
6. Moving messages takes a while – I let it run while I had dinner and found about 2000 messages moved over when I returned

You have now migrated your email to Gmail! Here are a few gotchas I noticed:

• As I mentioned above, the messages will not show up in the Inbox, but can be accessed by clicking on the label or through the search box Update: After a few days, my Gmail inbox does now include all of my “Old Mail”, even those without the “Inbox” label.  Weird.
• Native messages from or to an exchange account also configured in Outlook show up as “Unknown sender” and “No subject” because Gmail can’t figure out their headers. The data is there, and it’s searchable, but not all that readable.
• Gmail de-duplicates messages rather effectively – drag the same message in 12 times and it only shows up once! This is very cool, but can be frustrating if you trash a message and then try to copy it in again, as I did while trying to figure this all out! If it’s in Gmail’s trash, it will never show up in the desired folder!
• For some reason, my iPhone (which uses IMAP to connect) immediately downloaded all the old messages I just copied into my Inbox, bumping my real new mail from its list even though it supposedly sorts by date… So suddenly the top unread messages in my iPhone inbox were dated from 2001 and earlier! Pretty funny, really, but not at all as expected. Mail without the Inbox label (dragged to another folder/label) does not exhibit this problem, though.

Good luck with this, and I hope it helps! By the way, a similar process helped me migrate my even-older mail through Thunderbird…

Update: After others have tried this method, they have reported that Gmail is sorting the messages wrong in the main Inbox list – sorting by date of import rather than date of receipt.  I have no such problem, though Gmail did apparently rescan my “Old Mail” messages and add them to my Inbox at some point over the last few days.  So maybe you have to wait a while?  Also, I wanted to note that I did my import using Outlook 2002, so maybe there are weird effects of using other Outlook versions…

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2007. | Import your old Outlook/Express PSTs to Gmail
This post was categorized as Personal, Terabyte home. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.