Printer Friendly Version

Instant messages offer a quick and convenient way to communicate at work, but many employees at brokerage firms have found their IM lifeline suddenly cut off. In the wake of the Enron scandal, new government regulations have been passed that require many companies that work with outside clients to log all outside communications, in case they're needed later as evidence.

When faced with that kind of task, many IT departments throw up their hands and ban IM clients in the workplace. Archiving e-mail is hard enough, but finding a way to archive IM sessions is more than an overtaxed IT staff can bear.

If you're now facing these same hurdles, you'll be glad to hear that eVault has created ProMail, an outsourced e-mail and IM archiving solution targeted at mid-sized broker/dealer companies.

Established in 1997 and based in Walnut Creek, Calif., eVault is already known for its hosted backup and recovery solutions. After the archiving regulations were passed, eVault employees saw that their brokerage clients were struggling with the requirements, and so they decided to fill the need. ProMail has also found a home with law firms, financial companies, and medical offices — anywhere that sensitive communications with outside clients could later cause a problem.

ProMail is entirely hosted, so there's nothing to install on your network. Once you've signed up and paid for the service, you speak on the phone with an eVault technician who walks you through the configuration process. ProMail works with a number of popular mail servers, including Exchange, Domino, and POP. The phone call takes about an hour for a mid-sized company, while the rest of the configuration process is done in 15 to 20 minutes. Giving ProMail access to your mail server is a simple operation, while archiving IM sessions has a bit of grunt work to it: you'll need to visit every employee who uses an IM client and set the app to use eVault as a proxy server.

It doesn't take an IT genius to see that employees can easily get around ProMail if they don't want their conversations recorded. E-mail on browser-based services like Hotmail isn't archived, and employees can circumvent the IM logging by simply changing their server settings back. A strict corporate policy against doing so might be your best defense.

ProMail not only archives e-mail and IM sessions, it also flags suspicious e-mail and saves it for the administrator to review. It does this by working off a list of "red flag" keywords, which are entirely customizable by the administrator. The idea is that these keywords may indicate messages that shouldn't go out to clients. When an employee sends a note with one or more of these words, he or she immediately gets a message saying that the e-mail is being held for administrative review. Then the admin can survey the note and either allow or disallow it.

ProMail's pricing starts at $11 per mailbox per month, and allows 100MB of storage for each e-mail address. Instant Message monitoring costs a flat $2,500 for up to 41 accounts. Phone support is free on weekdays during the day, and is available for a fee on an hourly basis after that.

In eVault ProMail's browser interface, the administer can examine flagged messages for inappropriate content.