Email Metadata in SharePoint
Email Metadata in SharePoint: What It Is and Why It Matters
When organisations save emails to SharePoint, they often assume that the system automatically preserves all the important information about the original message. Email metadata in SharePoint helps make that information useful for search, classification and records management.
The challenge is that standard SharePoint properties may describe the SharePoint item rather than the original email. Created By and Created Date can tell you who uploaded an item and when it was added, but they may not represent the original sender or the date the email was actually sent or received.
What Is Email Metadata in SharePoint?
Email metadata is information that describes an email record. It can include the original sender, recipients, subject, date and business context associated with the communication.
- Sender and recipients
- CC recipients
- Email subject
- Original sent or received date
- Client, project or matter information
When these details are stored as SharePoint metadata fields, teams can use them to filter, search and manage email records without relying only on the file name or folder location.
Related Reading: What Is Metadata and Why It’s the Secret to Finding the Right Email Fast
Why Standard SharePoint Metadata Can Be Misleading for Emails
Standard SharePoint metadata works well for many documents, but email records have an important difference: the information about the SharePoint file is not always the same as the information about the original communication.
For example:
| SharePoint Item | Original Email | |
|---|---|---|
| Person | Kate – who saved the email | Nick – original sender |
| Date | 5 April – date saved to SharePoint | 4 April – original sent date |
If an organisation relies only on the SharePoint item’s creation information, the original communication timeline and ownership can become harder to understand.
Why Original Email Properties Matter
Preserving the original properties makes email records more useful after they have been stored in SharePoint.
- Find correspondence from a specific sender or client
- Search communications by project or matter
- Understand the timeline of a conversation
- Identify who was involved in a communication
- Support consistent email records management
What Information Should Be Preserved?
The exact metadata structure depends on the organisation, but commonly useful email properties include the original sender, recipients, subject and sent or received date, along with relevant business context.For a detailed explanation of the six core fields, see 6 Essential Metadata Fields for SharePoint Email Records.This keeps the two articles focused: this page explains the broader role of email metadata, while the dedicated guide explains which fields teams should consider using.
Why Manual Metadata Capture Creates Problems
Asking users to manually enter information that already exists in the email creates unnecessary work and can lead to inconsistent records.
- Missing or incomplete metadata
- Different naming or values between users
- Incorrect dates or people
- Extra steps when saving an email
- Lower user adoption of the filing process
A practical email management process should make saving an email simple while still capturing the information needed later.
How to Automate Email Metadata Capture
The original email already contains many of the properties organisations need. Instead of asking users to re-enter them, an automated process can extract those properties and map them to the appropriate SharePoint metadata fields.This is the purpose of email metadata capture: preserve useful information from the original message while reducing manual data entry.Users can then focus on adding business context when required, such as a client, project, matter or case.
How Konnect eMail Helps
Konnect eMail helps organisations save Outlook emails and attachments to SharePoint while capturing relevant email properties as metadata.
- Reduce repetitive manual metadata entry
- Preserve useful information from the original email
- Improve consistency across saved email records
- Make email records easier to search and manage
This connects the email-saving process with SharePoint email management instead of treating the email as only another file in a document library.
How Metadata Improves Email Search
Good metadata allows users to ask practical questions about stored correspondence.
- Show emails from a particular client
- Find correspondence related to a project
- Find emails sent or received during a specific period
- Filter records by business context
The goal is not to create as many fields as possible. The goal is to capture information that people will actually use when they need to find or manage an email record.
Metadata and Email Governance
Metadata helps describe and classify email records, while retention policies and retention labels determine how content is managed over time. They work together but serve different purposes.For the retention side, link to Retention Policies vs Retention Labels for Email Records in SharePoint.Metadata and Email Governance
Automate Email Metadata Capture
There are a few ways we can approach this:
- Calculated columns: these can be used for calculations based on dates, numbers, string manipulation etc. and have conditional logic using the IF statement.
- Workflow: they can be used for advance features like lookup based calculation, approvals, web service call etc.
- Code: use this for all other automation use cases. SharePoint offers CSOM & JSOM for accessing most of its objects using client code/scripts.
Email Metadata in SharePoint
And what about email metadata? Well, SharePoint out-of-box does not provide a method to automate the extraction of email properties.
We have developed Konnect eMail SharePoint Email Parser app that can be used for this specific use case by deploying it to the SharePoint farm/tenancy. It automates this manual process of capturing emails actual properties resulting in lower rate in user adoption of SharePoint as an EDRMS and reducing the risk to records compliance.
Conclusion
Email metadata in SharePoint is valuable when it preserves information about the original communication rather than only information about the SharePoint file.Capturing original email properties consistently can make correspondence easier to search, classify and manage. Automating that capture also reduces the amount of manual work required from users.
