>>Mike wrote:- native to Outlook format, therefore, admissible in the
court;<<

I wouldn't hang my hat on this, last time I looked native format was not
a hearsay exception.  (Standard disclaimer: I am not an attorney and do
not give legal advice.)  Now that we have that out of the way...

Maintaining the header information is the equivalent of maintaining the
envelope of a letter.  We rarely keep those, why would we want to keep
all the header information for an email?  If I want to forward or reply,
I can use the copy/paste function into a new email.

>>Peter wrote: The court held that the magistrate's order was
"reasonable" because it merely required the defendant to produce the
data in the format in which they were stored in defendants' usual course
of business.<<

This is understandable, if the information is retained in one format, it
is reasonable to provide it to the other party in that format.  But the
court would also appear to be saying that if your email mail standard
was to retain the emails as RTF's, producing them in the RTF format
would also be acceptable.

The bottom line appears to remain the same, establish a policy then
stick to it.

Bill Roach, CRM
Enterprise EDMS Coordinator
State of North Dakota
ITD/Records Management
701-328-3589

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