Email and Classification – Is your system Machine-Assisted or User Applied? Classifying Jokes, Secrets and need to know Emails!
Emails continue to be an important part of information management. Classifying, tagging or flagging them as “privileged” or “private” or even “junk” is a critical function in terms of determining how they are handled. Do they need to be kept and if so, for how long? Messages marked “secret” might only leave the company if they’re encrypted and how does one search for that email during an e-discovery process? There are essentially two kinds of email and classification and these are machine-assisted and user applied. Knowing the difference will help your organization determined what software is right for your company.
We classify emails to simplify how they are handled. With machine assisted classification a computer will scan and classify them accordingly. The benefits of this are that limited human involvement is required and since “rules don’t change” the classification will remain consistent. The downside? Computers can’t think – at least not yet! This can lead to potential inaccuracies, even when some of the newer, more sophisticated computer “learning systems” are employed.
With user-applied email classification, senders apply classifications to their emails before they are sent and sometimes they can even classify them after they are received. There are pros and cons to this method as well. An obvious upside is that generally, people can employ reason and know the nature of the email and therefore classify it accordingly. The downside of course is that this results in an increased workload for the user and potential inconsistencies in the application of classifications. Human nature means one persons “important” is another’s “urgent” and without rules managing these messages later during any kind of ediscovery process becomes difficult.
Whatever your company determines as important in terms of email and classification, Sherpa software can help. There is software for almost any type of situation and technology is evolving every day. Sherpa will work together with your organization to ensure, whether machine applied or user applied, you get an email classification system that helps you separate the jokes from the “need to know!”
Please share this information with your colleagues or send us your questions, comments and feedback to: mailto:waynes@flexnet.com . Please click here or you can find more information on Sherpa’s Altitude IG on our web site www.flexnetsoftware.com and we look forward to answering any Email and Classification | Categorization, Information Governance | eDiscovery questions you may have; please contact us at 1 (800) 263-8733
Email and Classification