Preservation of Electronic Mail

1
Preservation of Electronic Mail

• Druscie Simpson
• NC State Archives
• November 19, 2004

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E-mail The Digital Divide Also Multiplies
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E-mail as a Burden

• The Radicati Group and Merrill Lynch estimate
  that email is growing at a rate of 300 annually.
  The Age (July 8, 2003)
• The real problem not more email, but larger and
  larger attachments, generating an average of 5MB
  of email content daily. The Age (July 8, 2003)
• Email generates about 400,000 terabytes of new
  information each year worldwide
• About 31 billion emails are sent daily, on the
  Internet and elsewhere, a figure which is
  expected to double by 2006 (source International
  Data Corporation (IDC). The average email is
  about 59 kilobytes in size, thus the annual flow
  of emails worldwide is 667,585 terabytes. (How
  Much Information 2003, UC Berkeley)

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       What do I do with ALL that e-mail?!     

• Why are we so interested in E-Mail and Digital
  Records?
• Emails far reaching effects

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Loss of Corporate Knowledge

• Imagine youre new in the office. All of the
  information to do your job was on your computer.
  Your predecessor deleted the information before
  leaving or it was password protected. You dont
  have the password.

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Legal Implications

• If it is in an email and it sent from, received
  by, or is stored on a government computer, it is
  a legal record
• Never put anything in an e-mail you dont want on
  the front page of the local paper.
• Always CYO cover your office.)

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Users have several options for keeping their
saved e-mails

• They may leave it on the mail providers server
• They may leave it on a web-based mail server such
  as Hotmail or Yahoo
• They may store it in their e-mail client such as
  Outlook, Eudora, Netscape
• They may store it on the file system of their PC
  as individual .eml files (MS Outlook Express
  Electronic Mail)

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• In each of these circumstances the actual byte
  stream used to represent the e-mail message is
  slightly different.
•  While an e-mail server and e-mail client are
  obliged to communicate with each other using
  standards (SMTP, POP3, and IMAP) they are not
  required to store the e-mail using any sort of
  standard.

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We will be looking for a solution that will have
the widest possible use

• Start with an IMAP server
• Enhance server with the ability to take the
  contents of its message store and create the
  desired standard XML files called XMTP
• Using XMTP, SMTP messages can be transformed via
  XSLT into HTML pages for viewing. XMTP has been
  used to implement a telemedicine consultation
  system using SMTP e-mail and HTML
• In the testing phase, but not launched yet
• http//sourceforge.net/projects/smtp/

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• IMAP seems to be the only protocol that supports
  moving and copying e-mail messages from place to
  place while preserving the e-mail messages
  native format.
• This means that no matter where the e-mail
  message ends up, almost any IMAP compliant e-mail
  client can send it to an archives server.

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How?

• Have the user send e-mail directly to a server
  hosted by the NC State Archives
• Have the user send e-mail to an enhanced IMAP
  server maintained by their agency
• This would enable the agency to be able to
  locally access the archives e-mail messages
• IMAP server could then send snapshots to or send
  us the XMTP files on electronic media via USPS

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• Have the user collect and send .pst files to the
  NC State Archives
• Archives will open them with Outlook and move
  them to the enhanced IMAP server (process would
  be automated)
• Archives should also be able to access packages
  of e-mail in other formats since Outlook can
  convert from Eudora, Netscape, etc.
• Once loaded into Outlook, the e-mail packages
  would then be sent to the IMAP server.

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• Any strategy based on the interception of the
  data stream is out since we want to collect the
  e-mail message only after the user has been given
  a chance to cull and organize them.

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• Our proposal is to use hmailserver (a source
  forge open source project) which is an IMAP
  server that uses MySql or Microsoft SQL server as
  its message store.
• http//www.hmailserver.com

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• The hMailServer installation contains a minimal
  MySQL-installation, so if you don't already have
  a database server in your network, MySQL is
  installed automatically when you install
  hMailServer.
• The XML creation utility could interface directly
  with the message store instead of the IMAP
  protocol.
• Hmailserver comes with an attendant com component
  that can be used to access the data store

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Life of an e-mail message

• E-mail message is sent to the users mail server
• User downloads the message to his/her mailbox
• User optionally places the message into a folder
  on his/her local system
• User creates a folder on the Archive IMAP
  server
• User moves the mail from his/her inbox or
  specified folder to the folder on the Archives
  IMAP server
• An administrator requests that the IMAP server
  create one or more XML files containing the
  users e-mail
• XML files are saved as a preservation copy

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Access to Email 1

• Load the XML into ENCompass
• Utilize the IMAP server by enhancing it to
  provide web access to its native store similar to
  the user interface provided by Lurker
• http//sourceforge.net/projects/lurker

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Access to Email 2

• Utilizing Documentum by enhancing it to ingest
  the XML produced by the IMAP server.
• Documentum server would be used purely as an
  e-mail repository, not as a document management
  application.
• Utilize Documentum as a document management
  application to interfile e-mail messages into
  named record series

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Access to Email 3

• Move e-mail messages into a Share Point Portal
  server
• Use Outlook to collect the message from the IMAP
  server and send them to SPP.
• Switch-to-Switch Protocol. Protocol specified in
  the DLSw standard, used by routers establish DLSw
  connections, locate resources, forward data, and
  handle flow control and error recovery.?
• XML files would serve purely as a preservation
  copy.

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This Particular Project

• Take 6 gigabytes of e-mail from Governor Jim
  Hunts administration (1993-2001 bulk dates
  1997-2001) and make it accessible and
  preservable.
• E-mail has been appraised and culled to create
  the core for preservation
• E-mail is in Microsoft Outlook .pst files and can
  be accessed only by using the correct version of
  Outlook
• Create/utilize programs to move the e-mails out
  of Microsofts proprietary .pst format into a
  non-proprietary and stable XML format

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• Also want to write software that is more
  universal in scope and can be used with most
  electronic records.
• Hire a programmer to write code to convert the
  .pst files from their format to XML format
• Take the converted XML files and load them onto
  our server and make them available to the public
  via the web and searchable through our online
  catalog system (ENCompass/MARS)

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Wish us luck!

• We are very excited to have this opportunity to
  explore this potential solution
• We hope to take what we learn and apply it to the
  collection of other electronic government
  resources that are archival
• Well keep you posted!