News & Blog

Key Features of an Email Audit

Following on from our recent blog post on Why You Need to Conduct an Email Audit, here we have decided to take a look at some of

Following on from our recent blog post on Why You Need to Conduct an Email Audit, here we have decided to take a look at some of the key features that may be included in an email audit.

The Issue Audit

The issue audit focuses on providing email history and documentary evidence in the event of a legal or human resources issue arising within the organization. This may be due to an employee complaint of some manner, for example in the event of alleged harassment or bullying.

This may also be required by the human resources department for evidence as part of the organization’s disciplinary procedure or to build a case for dismissal. Additionally, these kinds of requests can arise due to legal requests arising from ongoing litigation.

The Virus Audit

The virus audit helps to secure your organization’s system in the event it is infected by some form of virus or similar. This focuses on locating and identifying the infection path of the virus and analyses details of historical instances of known viruses.

The Security Audit

This part of the email audit will highlight if confidential breaches are taking place. For example, disclosure of customer information or the release of trade secrets or proprietary information to competitors. The security audit can also provide insight into the appropriateness of communication getting through your gateway and help to identify instances of undesirable communications.

The Compliance Audit

This stage of the email audit is focused on measuring conformance and identifying incidences of non-conformance with regards to your organization’s Acceptable Usage Policy. The compliance audit also helps to ensure that corporate governance expectations are being met and all relevant data protection, industry and regulatory requirements are being met.

The Spam Filtering Audit

This part of the audit focuses on optimization of your organization’s spam and content filters. It is concerned with providing the facts, figures and information so that spam and content filtering performance can be understood and improved upon.

By effectively identifying and analyzing incidents of spam and content abuse, your organization can more effectively leverage its investment in content filtering

The Benchmarking Audits

This part of the email audit can identify key measurements for email usage in your business and comprehensively report against these and best practice. Examples of this include:

  • Email ‘real cost’ tracking and mailbox storage reporting
  • Departmental performance metrics for sales and customer service
  • Content filter and spam statistics so performance can be improved