PST – The RAT of ESI

A Personal Storage Table, better known as the “PST”, is the RAT of the ESI world.  A PST is an archive file that Microsoft Outlook users use to manage email messages, calendar items and other things normally managed by Outlook.  A PST file is usually stored on a user’s hard drive, or on a network share, as opposed to archived email managed by Microsoft Exchange or Symantec’s Enterprise Vault.  A PST email archive is usually created by individual users to store email outside of the corporate email environment and circumvent server storage quotas.  That 100 MB limit that for me is reached in the first two hours of the day.  As a result, these packRAT users are creating thousands of unmanaged files across the enterprise.  Because these personal folders are stored on individual work stations rather than on a centralized email systems, the corporate retention policies become unenforceable.  While IT solves their problem of keeping the email environment manageable, out of sight, out of mind, considerable increase in legal risk is created by keeping too much information.  While that archived email may be out of the sight of IT, legal is going to come looking and find a lot of information.  It won’t be good news that engineer has 5 years of PST archives on his laptop.  So much information, in fact, that with Outlook 2007, MS increased the functional limit of a PST file from 2 GB, to 20 GB!  Of course, a 20 GB PST won’t perform very well for the user, no matter what Microsoft says, but certainly well north of the previous 2 GB functional limit, which means a user will keep email far longer.  Thanks Microsoft!  Newer versions are going to give us some help with archives, but it will take years for the market to upgrade. 

Each GB of PST file size can contain 10,000 – 35,000 email or more. So, 20 GBs of PSTs could contain 500,000 email messages. Of course, the weight of an email in terms of GB size depends on the size of attachments. A company culture that tends to send a lot of physical attachments to email, as opposed to sending links to document libraries in SharePoint or other Document Management Systems (“DMS”), for example. With those document counts, it takes only a few PackRAT custodians to generate millions of files. When the lawyers come knocking for those PST files, usually scattered across the network and on user drives, the volume of information that must be processed and sorted through can be very, very costly.

There are a few steps you can take that will help.  Doing nothing and letting those RATs spread is going to make the organization sick.

1.  Increase the mail box limit to a reasonable size commensurate with today’s eSociety. Say 1 GB. Find a way to enforce retention schedules.

2.  Utilize email archiving application. Yes, it will cost money, but it will save a ton even if you don’t do another thing but enforce your retention/destruction policies. Can’t afford the implement email archiving software – outsource to the cloud.

3. Ban the PST file. Unmanaged email volume is killing you. Users archive within the system, or not at all.

4. DO NOT journal PST files!!! You will create a great deal of effort. Simply place a stake in the ground and ban them going forward.

5. Put a long term plan together to phase out (via retention policy enforcement) historical PST files starting with a voluntary destruction of out of date email archives for all users not on legal hold.