BELLEVUE, Wash. -- MessageGate, Inc., a leader in practical e-mail governance, today announced integration of MessageGate Archive Categorization with Symantec Enterprise Vault, providing archive categorization and retrieval functionality to the archiving framework in which Enterprise Vault customers already exist.

Effective Dec. 1, 2006, the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) require companies to make relevant information available with greater speed and accuracy than ever before. The result is a peaking demand by businesses for advanced archive and categorization capabilities.

“As part of the new requirements, corporations are responsible for maintaining a good working knowledge of what corporate e-mails contain and to manage their archives accordingly,” said Mark Levitt, senior analyst, IDC. “Best practices dictate that companies classify e-mail prior to archiving in order to catalogue retained records and simplify retrieval activities.”

“Under the new FRCP requirements, corporations need to know what corporate e-mails exist and what content those e-mails contain and to manage the archives accordingly,” said Mark Levitt, vice president for collaborative computing and the enterprise workplace at IDC. “Classifying e-mails as they enter archives helps to minimize the cost and time for identifying and retrieving e-mails containing discoverable information in a lawsuit.”

MessageGate Archive Categorization intelligently categorizes e-mails prior to archival, adding supplemental information and meta-tags to each message. In turn, this allows messages to be indexed and enables specific attribute requests when retrieving files in Enterprise Vault.

Integration between Symantec Enterprise Vault and MessageGate Archive Categorization represents a cost-effective and scalable approach to e-mail classification. The technology is easily deployed and supports Windows, Linux and Solaris operating systems, providing businesses a complete solution to manage the complexity of storing and retrieving e-mail records.

“MessageGate Archive Categorization was designed specifically to analyze electronic records and take defined actions,” said Robert Pease, vice president of marketing for MessageGate. “Practical and easy to use, it was built for archives, not adapted.”

Symantec Corp. (Nasdaq: SYMC)