Client Email Groups

Policy

Email related to client projects may contain sensitive information, and should be carefully controlled. Email groups shall be used to manage communications related to individual client projects. They shall be created when a project begins and archived when it ends. Employees and contractors will be encouraged to use the email lists for all client communications. Employees and contractors will remove copies of the emails contained on their computers at the end of a project, so that the archived emails under the control of the company serve as the only remaining copies of those messages.

Scope

This policy applies to all Lullabot employees and management.

Compliance

• Project or account managers will notify administrative staff when projects are initiated and when the projects end so the email groups can be created and decommissioned.
• Administrative staff will periodically review email groups to identify any that should be decommissioned, and do so.

Explanation and Implementation

Email with clients often contains sensitive information, so it must be carefully controlled. Email, by its nature, is difficult to control, since copies will be stored locally for every participant in the email message.

To better control this information, the company will create an email list for each client project and encourage employees, contractors, and clients to send email to that list when communicating about the project. The members of that list will include the staff members assigned to that project and relevant management representatives, like the account manager.

At the conclusion of a project, the email group will be decommissioned. The process of decommissioning the group will consist of:

• Sending a final email to all members of the group announcing that the group is being decommissioned and asking them to remove any copies of those emails that they have on their own computers.
• Removing all members from the group.
• Removing the option to post to the group.
• Renaming the group to a name that begins with 'ZZZ' to sort the decommissioned groups to the bottom of group lists.

At the conclusion of this process, management will still have a copy of all the messages in the group, should it be needed in the future, but all other copies of the messages in the possession of company employees and contractors should be deleted.

There will be additional benefits from directing all communications through the designated email group. Clients can easily communicate with the team without knowing every member's individual email address. In addition, new team members can be added into the group at any time, and they will have the ability to review prior communications with the client.