Former Employee E-mail Clean-Up

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Delete E-mail Records

E-mail Records and Attachments

If your office uses Time Matters E-mail to send or receive e-mail, you may be left with a former employee's E-mail records and Attachments that are invisible and inaccessible from within Time Matters.

The risks of not cleaning up the Personal Inboxes of former employees include:

  • Potentially embarrassing or damaging information may be retained for years only to crop up later;

  • Important client communications may be lost in inaccessible E-mail records and Attachments;

  • Your database and backups may be invisibly bloated by large, useless, invisible Attachments.

Deleting former employees' USER records does not delete the contents of their Personal Inboxes. Their Personal Inboxes may contain two types of e-mails:

  1. Inbox Only records that appear only in their Personal Inboxes and are linked to any Contacts or Matters, and

  2. E-mail List records that appear on the Main E-mail list and may or may not be linked to Contacts or Matters

If you delete the USER record, that person's Inbox Only e-mails will be hidden and unavailable within Time Matters. If you ever add a new USER with exactly the same User Name, the former user's old e-mail will reappear in the Personal Inbox.

Preserving Time Matters E-mails and Attachments

You may simply want to delete a former employee's Inbox Only E-mails and Attachments. If so, skip to the next section.

If you need to preserve a record of the e-mails, you may move them to the E-mail List or print them to paper or PDF. If you print them, you still need to delete them from the Personal Inbox following the steps in the next section, below.

To print E-mail records:

  1. Tag them within the Personal Inbox

  2. Press the Printer icon

  3. Choose Standard Report

  4. Print them to paper or PDF file.

Similarly, you can preserve any Attachments by opening each e-mail and saving or printing its Attachment.

To move e-mails out of the Personal Inbox, link them to a Contact or Matter (perhaps using a Matter created for this purpose).

To move e-mails out of the Personal Inbox, you may do so one at a time. Open each one, link it to a Contact or Matter, and be sure the Show on Email List box is checked.

To move many e-mails, you need to set two Inbox Options that will allow you to tag many e-mails and move them all at once using Process | Set Regarding.

To set the options for moving many e-mails:

  1. Click the Options button in the Personal Inbox or go to Main Menu | File | Setup | General | User Level | Advanced Options

  2. Click the Send tab

  3. Press the Set Email Form Options button

  4. Check: Check 'Show on List' when Regarding Field is Completed

Deleting Time Matters E-mails and Attachments

Important: Do not delete E-mail records from the Personal Inbox that have Show on List checked. These e-mails have been linked to Contacts or Matters and may be essential to the history of your work for clients.

Here is how to select and delete just the Inbox Only records, the ones that do not have Show on E-Mail checked.

To delete Inbox Only e-mails:

  1. Open the Personal Inbox

  2. Click on Inbox

  3. Go to: Main Menu | Search | Advanced Search

  4. Select from the drop-downs: Show on E-Mail | Is Equal To | N

  5. Press OK

  6. Press Ctrl-T to tag all records

  7. Go to: Main Menu | Process | Delete Records

  8. Click Yes

Repeat these steps for e-mails in any of the following folders in the Personal Inbox:

  • Outbox

  • Sent Items

  • Draft

  • Archive

Important: After you finish deleting E-mail records, they are all still in the Deleted Items folder. To eliminate all the deleted e-mails:

  1. Right-click on the Deleted Items folder

  2. Click: Empty 'Deleted Items' Folder

Finding and Cleaning Up "Invisible" Employees

You may have already have deleted some USERS from Time Matters, leaving you with invisible and inaccessible E-mail records and Attachments. In order to clean up the e-mail records of deleted former employees, you need to add them back to Time Matters as Users.

To track down their User Names, you could look in old E-mail records to find old User Names in the From field. Remember that User Names may be the same as or different from Staff initials. Once you find the User Names, you need to add them as Users.

To add a deleted former employee as a User:

  1. Go to Main Menu | File | Setup | User and Security | Users

  2. Press the Add button.

  3. Enter the User Name of the former employee.

After processing the former User's e-mail records, you may safely delete them from the Users list.

To delete Users:

  1. Go to Main Menu | File | Setup | User and Security | Users

  2. Click on the User.

  3. Click the Delete icon.

You may only delete Users one at a time.

A more systematic approach to finding deleted former employee User Names is to work with LexisNexis Certified Independent Consultant or a database technician to run the following query using MS SQL Server:

-- List User Names with E-mail Counts
SELECT user_name, COUNT 'E-mail Count'
FROM lntmuid.email
GROUP BY user_name@

For Time Matters 13 and earlier, consult with a Time Matters expert.

If you have some E-mail records that have no user_name, they will appear at the top of your list with an empty field for user_name and a count number for records. To clean up their E-mail records, you may use the following query:

-- Delete E-mails with no user_name that are not in the E-mail list
DELETE
FROM lntmuid.email
WHERE user_name = '' AND showlist = '' -- Two single quotes

Keeping E-mails and Attachments of Former Employees

If you find all these clean-up procedures rather burdensome, you can avoid them by retaining the USER records of former employees. You do not have to move or delete their E-mail records and Attachments if you do not need to. But bear in mind that the only way to get at Inbox Only E-mails and Attachments will be to login with the User Names of former employees and open their Personal Inboxes.