Email is the largest single source of records in most organizations, and for years it was also the hardest to manage. Asking every employee to identify, classify, and file their own email as records simply did not work at scale. The National Archives’ Capstone approach offered a practical way out.
The problem Capstone solves
Traditional email management was print-and-file or relied on each user to decide which messages were records and where they belonged. The volume made this hopeless: important records were lost, retention was inconsistent, and audits were painful. A different model was needed — one that did not depend on individual users sorting thousands of messages.
How Capstone works
Capstone is a role-based approach. Instead of scheduling email message by message, agencies schedule it based on the role of the account holder:
- The email accounts of senior officials (“Capstone officials” — agency heads, their deputies, and other key positions) are captured and preserved as permanent records, because their correspondence documents the most significant decisions.
- The accounts of other employees receive time-based retention — kept for a set number of years and then disposed of.
This lets an agency manage all of its email defensibly by capturing entire accounts according to position, rather than trying to appraise each message.
Why it matters
Capstone made large-scale email recordkeeping achievable and auditable. It aligns with the broader federal push toward electronic recordkeeping, and it ensures that the historically valuable correspondence of senior leaders is preserved for the National Archives while routine email is not kept indefinitely.
Beyond email
The same pressures now apply to text messages and chat. Courts and regulators treat these as records when they document business, and recent enforcement over “off-channel” messaging has pushed organizations to capture communications from mobile and collaboration platforms too. The Capstone lesson — automate capture, schedule by rule rather than by manual sorting — increasingly applies across all electronic communications.
Sources & further reading
Authoritative government and non-profit references.
- Capstone — Bulletin 2013-02 and email management guidance — National Archives (NARA)
How to cite this page
APA
RM University Editorial Team. (2026). Managing Email as Records: The Capstone Approach. Records Management University. https://www.recordsmgmt.org/articles/managing-email-with-capstone/
MLA
RM University Editorial Team. "Managing Email as Records: The Capstone Approach." Records Management University, 18 April 2026, www.recordsmgmt.org/articles/managing-email-with-capstone/.