To determine whether their email policies and practices present a risk - or whether they are on the right track, the experts in email compliance and risk management, Messaging Architects, announced today an offer to provide government, education and corporate organizations with a free email risk assessment.

VP of Professional Services at Messaging Architects, Anne-Lisa de Forest, said: "Organizations today are relatively efficient at maintaining their email security and system performance to ensure business continuity". "However, the majority of organizations are still not filtering their inbound and outbound emails to prevent data leakage and retaining their emails records for legal discovery or audit purposes. This creates major holes in their IT governance and risk management strategies."

De Forest explains that 75% of an organization's intellectual property gets circulated and stored via email. That's why email is subpoenaed in 75% of lawsuits.

Organizations run the risk of having intellectual property, confidential data and offensive emails enter and leave their organization which can lead to lawsuits, damage to reputation, and loss of competitive advantage, without an email content filtering and retention solution in place.

Further, organizations that cannot produce their email records on-demand during legal discovery will not be able produce the required evidence to defend themselves in the event of a lawsuit.

Messaging Architect's free email risk assessment will help create the much-needed awareness. Organizations that participate in the assessment will walk away with a scorecard that identifies their specific risk level in the areas of content filtering, compliance, policy, email security, record retention and system performance.