Celiac Disease and Email Archiving: 3 Ways They Are Strangely Similar

Working for a software company, it’s hard to NOT make odd comparisons about my day to day activities to the capabilities that surround me with the vast amount of technology available. Due to this, I have come to the conclusion that my small intestine needs an email archiving solution. Maybe not an email archive per-se, but definitely some sort of capability to stub out the gluten that I accidentally ingest to be archived and dealt with at a later time...preferably not at all.

You see, six days before my 27th birthday, I received a phone call from my doctor after being bedridden and sick for nearly 5 days. I, like any good patient, had googled my symptoms during the times of coherency (in between the stomach pains, vomiting, constipation, and almost narcoleptic sleep from being so sick.) and had decided that I either had some sort of stomach cancer, or I was pregnant with a parasitic zombie baby who was somehow eating me from the inside out. (Ok, I may not have been completely coherent.) That phone call from my doctor should have forever changed my eating life style.

"Sarah, you have Celiac Disease. No more gluten. Period. It's destroying your small intestine. I'm going to schedule you an appointment to meet with a nutritionist tomorrow. You need to go." He said that like he'd been my doctor for years, like he knew I would try and argue with him and say, "But doc, I have an almost religious dedication to beer. And I really really love flour tortillas.You're telling me that a stupid little storage protein that makes dough have its elastic stretchy-ness is why I'm, for lack of better words, "backed up" and am unable to function like a normal closet fat girl?! I'm pretty sure I can just take laxatives and cure this. I eat what I want, sir!"

I must have been in denial for the last 8 months. That's the only thing I can figure because I would still try and eat the toppings off my favorite non gluten pizza, and steal the cheese out of my son's uneaten quesadilla- resulting in me being an absolute sick, disgusting mess. And then I would get my act together, eat totally right and then get tempted by that delicious, devious gluten.  But the kicker is, the more I tried to skirt around and somehow trick my insides that I wasn't technically eating gluten, the more sick I would get with each ingestion of said evil protein. I was, for all intents and purposes, the most moronic person with Celiac Disease that I have ever met. Why would I continually make my self ill and unable to process food by eating things that are going to make me sick no matter how hard I try to convince myself they're ok because all the visible elements of the gluten is gone?

Somehow, after this last round of ever so diligently attempting to pull off all the little delectable pieces of crust from a teeny tiny piece of mouth watering cheesecake (which come to find out had flour in the cake itself...go figure) and failing miserably, in the midst of vomiting and being curled up in the fetal position, I saw the similarities between my apparent ignorance to the consequences of eating gluten and IT admins who are seemingly oblivious to the consequences of their lack of implementing an email archiving solution. (I swear, a comparison exists. I'm not getting dementia from the gluten like that one lady on that episode of House. However, I fully admit I may have a crude case of jealousy towards the IT admins who can rectify the comparison I'm about to make.)

1. Email Box Quota Reached:
   Those blasted email box quotas! Your end users can't just delete things, and even if they've been taught the double edged sword of exporting their emails to PST files, more often than not, they usually end up unable to send or receive emails due to their thresh hold being met on their email account. Maybe mailbox quotas aren't even the issue- maybe its the PST files scattered all across the network. Either way, leveraging an email archiving solution does away with both mailbox quotas and PST files by stripping the attachments out of the emails and replacing them with shortcut stubs back to the file in the archive per the policies that are set in place.
   As far as my digestive system is concerned, my quota is met by the most minuscule amount of gluten- its not like I can eat bread with a carrot and hope that the bread will be stubbed out to some sort of cheaper disk version of whatever it is that won't process the gluten. 
2. Backups Take FOREVER:
   It has to be one of the most dreaded things in the world for an IT admin to do backups of their company's email server- especially when it takes way longer than the designated time for it to be completed within. What happens when the backup is still occurring during work hours? While it goes without saying that a backup is not an archive, an email archive is most definitely an easily searchable, fully indexed, tamper proof backup that instantly captures, encrypts, and digitally time stamps every email that is sent or received through the organization's email server.
   Dealing with the analogy of backups alone, when I am "backed-up" there is no "designated time" for my digestive system to complete this process. It takes however long my body chooses for it to take. Something I am in complete protest of.
3. Just What Exactly is on My Email Server?
   Due to the amount of phone conversations I've had, it has become incredibly apparent to me that majority of IT admins have no clue what they have on their email server. How cool would it be to not only have ability to see true insight into your email environment, but to show you everything from sales and support productivity to tracking confidential information that is leaving the company as well as numerous other reports? Many email archiving solutions offer this type of capability, one that should be considered to be technology gold.
   Suffice it to say, unless I am keeping a food journal (which I don't) I don't get the luxury of being able to pull up a report to show me what food I ate that is causing me problems if I accidentally eat something "forbidden". I just get to sit here and feel sorry for myself, unable to pinpoint my problem and correct or eliminate it.

If you would like to find out more about how an Email Archiving Solution can help eliminate these, and many more problems, call us today to schedule a demo! (And if any of the Celiac symptoms that I have described resonate with you, please visit your local doctor.)