Used to be you'd send a snappy little e-mail, carbon copy your boss to cover your ass, and life was grand. I grew up on PROFS and then cc:Mail when we went to "store and forward" systems (whatever that meant). It was cute, a novelty, like Twitter but without all the vitriol. Now it's subpoena material, proof of your negligence, or maybe just your nonchalance. You write it and it lives forever, by law. From thus emerges companies like Greenview Data keeping everything in its cloud-based e-mail archiving system.Greenview, a software as a service, routes every piece of e-mail through its spam-filtering system (boldy called SpamStopsHere), and then onto your mail server. From there, it can send a copy to its restore e-mail archive cluster, all, so Greenview says, with undetectable delay. Not only can it serve as an archiving system, but it also provides e-mail continuity in case of down time -- that is, users can actually log into the system and act on e-mail the same way they can in their own mail systems in the event of downed mail servers or maintenance issues, for example.

The company's executives (Phil and Ted Green) gave me a demonstration and it works very simply. You can watch the video below to see for yourself -- for the demonstration they actually took 40,000 messages from Enron. This was e-mail data made public by the government after the Enron trials. Phil and Ted walk us through the IT adminstrator view and the end-user view. One key point here, though: the policy setting leaves me wanting a bit more, especially in this era of compliance regulation. It might be asking too much at this point, but I want to define policies based on actual compliance rules, likely by industry. Templates that helped companies do this would be of great help. Oh, and they could have shown me more juicy e-mail from the Enron files . . . but that's for another day.

Fritz Nelson is an Executive Editor at InformationWeek and the Executive Producer of TechWebTV. Fritz writes about startups and established companies alike, but likes to exploit multiple forms of media into his writing.

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