~Hurst, Ruth wrote: .... It is my understanding that even if you are
destroying e-mail records according to a legally validated retention
schedule, those e-mails can still be retrieved in court cases etc since
they never really go away, just sitting out there somewhere is cyberland
waiting to be caught. As a result our IT department is leaning towards
keeping everything indefinitely, saying why bother trying to cover
e-mails with retention schedules.

The most damaging E-mails that a company has are normally the ones that
got send internally between Management. Those E-mails should only be on
your companies E-mail system. 

Second I see no reason why a Backup Tape should be kept longer than a
year. So there should be no backup of any E-mail that got disposition,
because most records that have a retention value have a value that is
longer than a year.

And Third during discovery the opponent normally reviews only the
E-mails of the parties involved with the case and has no desire and/or
ability to search the entire cyberland. Furthermore it would be
difficult for anybody to prove the authenticity of an E-mail that was
pulled from cyberland. Opponents prefer to receive the E-mails from you
during a discovery because you authenticate the E-mails almost
automatically when you provide them to your opponent. 

So their argument that E-mails could be recovered from cyberlands holds
no ground at all.  

And lastly, in my opinion a big portions of E-mails have no retention
value and should be deleted as quickly as possible. To not have at least
a policy/program that supports the permanently deletion of Junk E-mails
is just irresponsible to your shareholders, taxpayers or whoever else's
money you are wasting. Naturally the previous stated only applies to
companies that are not required by regulation to keep all E-mails
(Sarbanes Oxley)

I wish you good luck to identify the correct path to take for your
company and to convince the other stakeholders that it is the correct
path to take.

Simon De Witt

Tampa Bay Water scans all email for viruses, 
worms, and inappropriate material and blocks email
deemed harmful or inappropriate. Email service is
provided to Tampa Bay Water users for business
purposes.

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