Scrubbing Metadata and Saving Email

O'Hagan, Smith & Amundsen

By Chuck Linebaugh

Q: IT Guy, with all the recent attention pertaining to discovery of Electronic Documents, I am very interested in making sure my documents do not contain "meta data" when I send them out through Email. What suggestions do you have?

A: Increasingly this has been a topic that continues to grow in concern for all electronic documents that are either sent out or saved on the company file server. The cleaning of meta data can be approached in a couple of ways, with cost being a leading factor in which route concerned companies take. There are programs, such as iScrub from Esquire Innovations, that clean all outgoing Emailed documents of the embedded hidden data. Another approach is to create a policy among employees to require all outgoing documents be sent in a .pdf format. Converting documents to .pdf format clears out the meta data and also compresses the file, an added benefit to large documents being Emailed. With a varying level of features, Adobe software offers either Elements or Acrobat. A recommended and less expensive alternative to Adobe Acrobat is RoboPDF.

Q: Dear IT Guy, my firm uses Microsoft Outlook and I would like to save a copy of my Email, Calendar appointments and Contacts. With an increasing need to be able to recover correspondence from archived Email I would like to preserve my own copy of this data.

A: From within Outlook: 1) go to File and select Import and Export; 2) select Export to a File ; 3) select the file format Personal Folder File (.pst) and highlight the Mailbox selection and make sure the Include Subfolders box is selected; 4) select the location you want to save this file to and proceed to create this file. Depending on how many items are in your Mailbox, you may need to save the file to optical storage to be able to store outside of the office.

E-Discovery