Email Management

Spring cleaning your electronic records

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As you begin to tackle your spring cleaning projects, consider adding your public email accounts to your list. Not only can maintaining a clean email account lead to greater efficiencies for you and your employer, it can also help to limit maintenance and storage costs, reduce public record response time, and decrease your public entity’s potential liability.

As a reminder, the Ohio Electronic Records Committee has created a new virtual interactive training series that is designed to provide information and best practices. As you’re cleaning up your email accounts this spring, we encourage you to review the following:

  • Examples of non-records and transient records that may be deleted immediately – Part One at 3:27 and Part Two at 11:34.
  • Questions you can use to determine whether a specific email should be retained – Part One at 5:17.
  • Tips for managing email threads and attachments – Part One at 7:52
  • Suggestions for sorting and organizing your email inbox – Part Two at 12:54 and Part Four at 0:25.
  • Best practices for setting up an efficient and effective email filing system – Part Three at 7:22.
  • Suggestions for creating automatic retention rules for emails in Microsoft Outlook – Part Four at 6:20.

It’s important to give your electronic records attention throughout the year, but sometimes we all need an extra boost to get us motivated. Spring is an excellent time to review your approach to recordkeeping and establish some new best practices to keep you on track throughout the year. We encourage you to watch the entire training series for more information. The series takes approximately one hour to complete and a Certificate of Completion is provided at the end of Part Four.

New Email Management Series Training Series Module

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The Ohio Electronic Records Committee is excited to announce a new virtual, interactive Email Management Training Series. The training series will provide information and best practices on managing email. The four sections of the training are Email As A Record, Email Clean-up Strategies, Email Filing and Organization, and Microsoft 365 Outlook Email Management. This training was made possible due to grant funding provided by the Ohio Historical Records Advisory Board and the National Historical Publications and Records Commission. Thank you to these organizations for their continued support of the Ohio ERC!

The Email Management Series online training is for use by state and local government officials and employees. The training will take approximately one hour. A Certificate of Completion will be provided for this training series at the end of Part Four.

Access the training modules for free at the links below:

Records and Information Management Month: Tips and Guidelines

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April is Records and Information Management Month. This April may look and feel very different than what Records Management professionals are used to. Many of us are currently working remotely and there is no better time than now to ensure good record keeping and best practices in your workplace. Here are some things to consider that can promote efficient and effective electronic record keeping in your organization during this time.

  • Are people in your organization working from home? Do they know their responsibility regarding managing electronic records? This month would be a great time to review your organization’s shared drive management and electronic records management policies and procedures.
  • Is your organization using text messaging to document business activities? Check out ERC’s Tips for Text Messaging Retention for best practices and risks/liabilities of using text messages for government business.
  • Have you been communicating more than ever through email? Review our Guidelines for Managing Email to ensure your organization is retaining emails effectively.
  • Is your organization communicating and posting via social media to interact with constituents? Check out ERC’s  Social Media Resources, including the new online training module, Social Media: The Records Management Challenge (2020) .