* Readers respond to recent newsletter about e-mail retention
One of my newsletters from last week on the wisdom of retaining old e-mail generated some interesting comments. Here’s a sampling:
“As a records manager, I have no problem with keeping e-mail with valuable content as long as it is useful, but why keep a decade plus of all that other ‘stuff’ that has no value? When litigation comes (and it will come) someone will have to sort through all of it…and search tools are only of limited use. Besides, while storage itself may be ‘cheap’ (debatable), the cost of supporting that storage is not. At 25+ terabytes and counting, I know that many of my legal department colleagues and I are looking forward to some serious deletion.”
“Could you please comment on things like Voice Mail and Fax? In many systems these are now attachments to e-mails….or are purposely kept separate ‘so we don’t need to retain them.’ Doesn’t the Federal Rules for Civil Procedures treatment of ESI [Electronically Stored Information] make that ‘keep it separate’ thinking dangerous for all the same reasons you’ve discussed here in regards to e-mail?”
These comments point to two important issues with which all companies will have to deal: a) making sure that you’ve specified the right amount of storage and the technologies that can manage all of the content you’ll need to store, and b) that you preserve everything you might need for e-discovery, regulatory compliance or other purposes. That includes not only e-mail and instant messages, but all of the other content you might need, including voicemails, faxes, data on file servers, data in collaboration systems, etc.
