For the past couple of years the Email & Messaging Retention Working Group (now known as RAWG) have been investigating email retention and destruction. 
One of the first questions we looked into was how to initiate automated destruction, behind the scenes, without asking anything extra of end-users. Last year the Working Group found success in guiding policy for automating destruction of Chat messaging in MS Teams, as well as default folders in FASMail including: Deleted Items, Junk Email and RSS Feeds. UBC’s hoard of transitory information got a little lighter in 2021.
One reason UBC staff accumulate unnecessary email is due, in part, to the lack of training on how to use Outlook’s functionality. One example I have noticed is scheduling meetings. There tends be a lot of back and forth email requesting available meeting times instead of using the Scheduling Assistant that displays the availability of all internal meeting attendees. Perhaps recipients immediately delete these kinds of emails or maybe they just sit in Inboxes all over the university, year after year, contributing to the weight of our institutional email burden. How can we get rid of the stuff we don’t want in our Inboxes and Sent items without having to do much to make it happen?
…much of what we were looking for in terms of retention and destruction in FASMail is already available in Outlook.
Because Outlook has been around for so long there’s an assumption that staff automatically know how to use all its functionality. For daily work we can get by with basic skills but over time what we don’t know about Outlook can negatively affect our Inbox and the university as whole. There are important but lesser-known features in Outlook that help reduce the amount of email we retain. The EMRWG takes a macro approach by guiding policy development; but as a university we could do a better job of training individual staff on all aspects of OutLook’s capabilities. Scott Baker, member of EMRWG told us that, to a greater or lesser degree, much of what we were looking for in terms of retention and destruction in FASMail is already available in Outlook. In addition to automating destruction of default transitory folders in FASMail the EMRWG also recommended developing short training material and make them available on the Records Management website.
In response, and as part of his WorkLearn duties, Andy Resto (dual student at UBC’s iSchool) created a series of ‘how-to’ one-pagers and accompanying brief videos targeting functionality within Outlook. I had the chance to review the series this week and it occurred to me that there are email in my Inbox that could benefit from what Andy was instructing. Just like everyone at UBC, I receive a lot of transitory email that might sit in my Inbox for a while before being deleted, a long while. The automated retention rules for FASMail implemented last year by UBC-IT do not include Inbox or Sent Items, only Deleted Items, Junk Email and RSS Feeds. However, nothing is stopping me from setting up my own custom automation targeting certain types of messages in my Inbox and Sent Items. As the saying goes: be the change you want to see!
OutLook Rules Combined with AutoArchiving
Andy’s workshop provides step-by-step instructions on how to set up a rule in OutLook that sends key email to target folders.
First I created three target Inbox folders:
Emails flying from my Inbox
1. Personal_30Days
These are emails from my partner asking me to bring home milk.
2. Notifications_90Days
These are typically list-serve and automated emails I receive from systems such as Canvas and Zoom.
3. Jira_Confluence_90Days
These are two ticketing systems sending notifications alerts to my Inbox.
As instructed, I added an additional condition on the target folders by using the AutoArchive functionality. Instead of storing email as the term “auto-archive” suggests… I calibrated the disposition to destroy (insert evil laughter here). In what sometimes feels like a sea of email, this small action buoyed me.
Watching the email fly from my Inbox into my newly created retention folders inspired joy. Pure Joy.
The three folders contain transitory records with two retention periods: 30 days for personal information; and 90 days for the rest. The retention schedule for transitory information states that I can delete these records as soon as they become transitory but I choose 90 days for everything, except personal, to align with automated destruction taking place on other transitory folders in FASMail. Instead of having to perform a search and destroy mission (when/if I remember), I can now leave the task to the rule.
Watching the email fly from my Inbox into my newly created retention folders inspired joy. Pure joy. But the rules are not perfect, I still have to ‘run the rule’ which means going to the ‘Folder’ tab in OutLook and choosing ‘run rules now.’ Additionally, today I noticed an email that should have been automatically moved to the notifications folder still sitting in my Inbox. I am willing to do further investigation into the cause of this error because the rules collectively have moved over a thousand emails out of my Inbox and more email are being automatically moved each day [update: the rules are now running as expected]. I enjoy watching them pile up in those retention folders.
Moreover, using OutLook’s inbuilt functionality means that more email is being sent to the Deleted Items folder on a regular schedule which is then is destroyed by automation put in place by IT Services. In short, more transitory email are getting removed from my FASMail more often and most of it is happening without very much interaction from me. It’s not perfect but it is better than what I was doing before. I am stopping at just these three folders but believe me when I say the urge to set up more rules is very strong.
If you are interested in learning how to set-up a retention rule on your transitory email using OutLook’s Auto-archiving function, please find the videos below. Additionally, you can view any of the videos Andy created here.
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