But e-mail, because of its nature, presents challenges to records management, says the report. First, the information contained in e-mail records is not uniform: it may concern any subject or function and document various types of transactions. As a result, in many cases, decisions on which e-mail messages are records must be made individually.
Second, the transmission data associated with an e-mail record -- including information about the senders and receivers of messages, the date and time the message was sent, and any attachments to the messages -- may be crucial to understanding the context of the record.
Third, a given message may be part of an exchange of messages between two or more people within or outside an agency, or even of a string (sometimes branching) of many messages sent and received on a given topic. In such cases, agency staff need to decide which message or messages should be considered records and who is responsible for storing them in a recordkeeping system.
Finally, the large number of federal e-mail users and high volume of e-mails increase the management challenge. Preliminary results of GAO's ongoing review of e-mail records management at four agencies show that not all are meeting the challenges posed by e-mail records.
Although the four agencies' e-mail records management policies addressed, with a few exceptions, the regulatory requirements, these requirements were not always met for the senior officials whose e-mail practices were reviewed. Each of the four agencies generally followed a print and file process to preserve e-mail records in paper-based record-keeping systems, but for about half of the senior officials, e-mail records were not being appropriately identified and preserved in such systems.
Instead, e-mail messages were being retained in e-mail systems that lacked record-keeping capabilities. (Among other things, a record-keeping system allows related records to be grouped into classifications according to their business purposes.) Unless they have record-keeping capabilities, e-mail systems may not permit easy and timely retrieval of groupings of related records or individual records.
Further, keeping large numbers of record and non-record messages in e-mail systems potentially increases the time and effort needed to search for information in response to a business need or an outside inquiry, such as a Freedom of Information Act request. Factors contributing to this practice were the lack of adequate staff support and the volume of e-mail received.
In addition, agencies had not ensured that officials and their responsible staff received training in record-keeping requirements for e-mail. If record-keeping requirements are not followed, agencies cannot be assured that records, including information essential to protecting the rights of individuals and the federal government, is being adequately identified and preserved.