Why you need an e-mail retention policy

As more and more business correspondence is carried out electronically, your organization may need to consider implementing a policy governing the retention of e-mail messages. Some people have the mistaken idea that the only important documents are paper ones. But Oliver North, whose deleted e-mail messages were retrieved during the course of the Iran-Contra investigation, could tell you otherwise. If your organization is ever investigated and e-mail records are subpoenaed, you could find your IT department open to accusations of cover-up if consistent message retention policies are not in place.

To avoid these accusations, first consider a default policy of archiving all mail as it is received on your servers for a certain time period. Prompt users to delete aging messages, knowing that they can access the archive later if need be. After a specified time, the archive itself can be cleared. In developing this kind of administration policy, you'll need to balance legal concerns with storage issues. Note that you'll have difficulty systematically saving or deleting users' messages once they have left the server for the workstation or, even worse, the laptop.

Because you probably won't want to save all messages forever, or even for a few years, find out whether there are lines of business conducted by your organization with legal retention requirements already in place. Such regulations cover accounting, pharmaceutical, legal, securities and many other industries. If you have retention requirements, identify classes of messages and groups of users that are generating these messages so that they can be subjected to exception processing.

Sound complicated? It is. The good news is that many vendors and consulting services are beginning to investigate these issues. If you start working on the retention problem now, you may have a solution in place if a legal concern ever arises.

Rapport Communication has recently merged with The Burton Group. The Burton Group is a leading information technology advisory and consulting firm. It provides in-depth analysis of emerging network computing technologies such as directory services, next generation messaging, secure messaging, NOS migration, public key infrastructure, and networking infrastructure. As part of its Network Strategy Service for network planners, The Burton Group offers the Catalyst Conference once a year in late July.

E-mail: The litigation time bomb. Your E-mail can become evidence, so craft a usage policy that you can stand behind. Network World, 4/7/97.

Understanding E-Mail Retention Requirements. This article, from the EMA's Messaging Magazine, focuses on government issues, but discusses such issues as what to do about mailing lists.

Is Your E-Mail Policy Sending the Right Message? A law firm looks at some of the issues involved.

Managing E-mail as Records. Synopsis of a survey of companies that store their e-mail in databases and how they deal with it.