> Our retention policy on email is that everything in the Inbox older than
> 90 days gets deleted, UNLESS the user moves/copies the message to a folder
> with longer retention (meaning, "until the employee is terminated, or
> decides on her own to delete the message").
>
> I'm fortunate that our General Counsel, to whom the Records Management
> Department reports, is aware of the value of/need for records management.
>


OKAY... I'll bite.

1) What do you do in cases where an employee may be on medical, maternity,
military or other leave and/or extended vacation?  If they're gone longer
than 90 days (or even 45-60 days), does the clock still tick against their
in box?

2) Which people are exempt from this- is it by title, rank, or? There HAVE
TO BE some 'officials' that have a requirement that all emails (that meet
the definition of a record) MUST be maintained, up to Permanently.

3) What about backups? Many/most organizations have a practice to store a
'digital haystack' or ALL incoming and outgoing messages for some fixed
period, then purge those when they wouldn't be needed any longer for
recovery from a failure of some type. Is the time frame LESS than 90 days
on this?

4) AND LASTLY... what about backups from desktops? If these are routinely
run (or if desktops are mirrored/replicated) and things were in the in box
and hadn't been moved... how long are THESE retained?

I know these questions MAY sound rhetorical, but they're not... they're
legit.  In the case of #1, part of what I'm thinking is the legal side of
things... if there's a case and some emails may be subject to discovery,
how do you ensure you can search before they're automatically destroyed if
these people have no control over what gets auto-deleted?

Also... you guys are a public agency, right?  So aren't these 'records' all
subject to Public Records Law?  If you have lackadaisical staff that fails
to move things from the in (or out, presumably) box to appropriate folders
to extend them to the proper retention periods... aren't you at risk of
destroying public records?

Sorry to make your Friday tough =)

Larry

-- 
*Lawrence J. Medina
Danville, CA
RIM Professional since 1972*

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