Organisations are now required to provide an audit trail of email misconduct

An email usage policy combined with ëperimeterí software has now become insufficient to protect directorsí liabilities as law-courts increasingly demand email audit trails and evidence of proactive management and protection for the corporation and its employees.



From the seemingly innocent joke through to racial incitement, the corporate landscape is littered with pitfalls for the modern director. It is essential for them to have preventative measures in place, and to be able to use these measures in order to protect themselves, their employees and their shareholders and demonstrate their ëduty of careí responsibilities.

ìMost directors have little or no control over employee email usage leaving them continually at risk from unintentional or intentional misuse of email,î states Steve Brookes, UK Country Manager of AfterMail. Email usage policies are no longer sufficient unless they can be demonstrably enforced. The intelligent and highly automated management, storage and retrieval of email by AfterMail minimises directorsí liabilities and provides quick and clear evidence in any courts ëdiscoveryí phase.

Brookes continues, ìEmail is seen by its users as a user-centric application and yet it pervades the entire organisation and is increasingly becoming the de facto standard for all forms of business communication. Misuse of email is an escalating problem. AfterMail puts control back in the hands of directors enabling them to quickly identify the small minority of people who are largely responsible for the majority of offensive email traffic within the workplace. The ëalertí mechanism with AfterMail enables managers to monitor for inappropriate material and racially offensive dialogueî.

The next-generation email archiving software from AfterMail is designed to efficiently store and monitor all corporate email activity, and notify the administrator of any potential problems. The program routinely scans all email traffic looking for a variety of alerts, including keywords and file type, which have been pre-set by the administrator. Any presence of the key alerts which have been deemed inappropriate, for example the word ëjokeí appears in the text, then the email is pro-actively quarantined.

Brookes concludes, ìAfterMail is the driving force behind protecting directorsí liabilities and the foundation upon which practical and sensible email management should exist. The cultural climate of litigation leaves no space for error on the directorsí part, for which ignorance is no excuse. By providing comprehensive email audit trails, AfterMail eradicates the ignorance which could prove fatal to the unprotected organisation in a court of lawî.