* Why it’s important for employers to save corporate e-mail
The best policy for any organization, regardless of size, is to save e-mail in an archive.
Although deleting all e-mail might delete YOUR copy of a message you’d rather not save, chances are someone else will have a copy. Here’s a case in point (with only minor edits from me) from a reader of this newsletter who has kept his own personal archive of e-mail:
“I’m a contractor. I once worked a [federal government] contract for about six years. The things I saw going on induced me to keep nearly every e-mail I ever received, as well as the outgoing responses. I archived them on 3.5-inch floppies and kept a hard drive ‘ready to boot’ with Windows for Workgroups 3.1.1 on it so that I could access my e-mail using [Lotus] cc:Mail, which was the program we were using at the time. I could just see myself… sitting under the bright lights on ‘The Hill’ answering questions about why I had done what I had done (‘Well, this instruction from my customer told me to…’). The archive fills a large index-card plastic box which I keep taped shut and stored in a fireproof safe in a concrete basement. (How long is the statute of limitations for criminal fraud again???)”
This is not an uncommon scenario, and the extent to which this is carried out might surprise a lot of managers. Many people save copies of their own e-mail which often contains e-mail messages from many other people in the organization. One of the reasons for doing so is simply to defend oneself if wrongly accused. An organization that does not archive its e-mail adequately runs the risk of facing an employee that has been diligent about archiving.
