Many email archiving companies have touted their de-duplication capabilities. The argument is that substantial savings can be found by saving one copy of a message when there are copies that are identical. One study from a vendor claims that 80% of all emails are duplicates.
But, when is a duplicate actually a duplicate? InBoxer believes a duplicate is only a duplicate when it is 100% identical including the meta tags (such as date, time and routing information). At least one court now seems to agree.
In Nursing Home Pension Fund v. Oracle, a shareholders' class action was brought by purchasers of Oracle Corp. stock against officers of the company and related defendants, The defendants produced more than 1,665 emails to or from Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, but that only 15 of those emails were actually identified as having come from Ellison's email box. Why? It is not clear. But, it is possible that Ellison's name appeared in the TO field of an email sent to another recipient. Did Ellison also get a copy?
The court found spoliation because it thought that it "could have been helpful to plaintiffs to demonstrate that certain e-mails were discovered in Ellison's files; otherwise, for instance, Ellison could argue that he never actually read or received an email that was sent to him, and thus had no knowledge of its contents." (Pennsylvania Law Weekly)
Leonard Deutchman, general counsel and administrative partner of LDiscovery LLC, said in Legal Technology that the ruling does not make sense because the de-duplication logs show what was removed. He had a lengthy discussion of the topic that is worth reading if you are into these legal issues.
I expect that the fight around de-duplication will grow. Some email archiving vendors could be at risk if their customers take legal action against their de-duplication practices. InBoxer strongly believes that only 100% duplicates should be removed and that all companies should be held to that standard. (More details on de-duplication from Deutchman.)




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