Archiving solutions will focus on the benefits related to litigation concerns, such as searching, auditing, discovery and automated retention periods, said Goodall. But that secondary store for e-mail is another important benefit, he said. "It greatly improves the operational efficiency of a traditional e-mail architecture, because it basically takes all messages coming in and breaks them up into a relational format," he said. This detects duplicate data and multiple versions of the same attachment, he said.

If someone, for example, returns from a honeymoon and e-mails 30 photos to everyone in the company, everyone's e-mail inbox will have those 30 images, he said. "E-mail archiving give you the ability to parse all of that ... it gives you IT efficiency there," he said.

"A lot of IT managers actually make the case for e-mail archiving, not necessarily from the litigation side, but from the IT efficiency side. It enables them to delay buying storage or improve the efficiency of their Exchange server," he said.

In terms of the legal implications of e-mail retention, there are two considerations: regulation and litigation. "From the compliance side, we have to keep things for a minimum period of time and then on the litigation side, we have to basically get rid of things as soon as possible," Goodall said.