Too much email? What should you do?
First things first -- get an email policy. Easy, right? However, once your organization has an email policy, specifically an email expiration policy, there arises the task of making that policy work on your Lotus Notes and Domino mail server. This article will address that task with a LotusScript agent for Lotus Notes and Domino servers running on the Microsoft Windows NT server platform.

A strategic approach to removing old email
The email portion of the Lotus Notes and Domino groupware software provides for a separate email database for each user. Database settings allow for automatic removal of email after a specified number of days, as well as automatic archiving. Because users manage their own email databases, the settings may be changed easily by them. The Lotus Domino R5 Application Server does seem to overcome this problem by allowing you to restrict users access to their own email databases. This presents problems of its own, however.

For example, email databases updated to R5 need to have their ACLs (Access Control Lists) reset, either manually or by custom programming that would access all email databases and run on the servers. Furthermore, there are advantages to allowing your users to have manager access to their email databases. Perhaps the most notable of these advantages is your ability to guide your remote users through problems that they could otherwise not fix without manager access. One such industry where this is particularly true is the oilfield services industry, where users requiring immediate solutions are often located at very remote well sites, or even on seismic acquisition ships, and just happen to be the staff who earn revenue for the company.

In Lotus Notes and Domino, the Domino server is the manager of the email database. Therefore, one solution to the central control of email is to run an agent on the server against the email databases residing on that server. The Domino server will have access to the email databases in order to perform the deletions. Of course you should give your users fair warning so that they might retain any email documents they deem important, in accordance with your organization's records retention policy.