Ruth

My personal opinion is that email (that is a record) should be captured
into your recordkeeping system and managed in the same way as every
other type of record your organisation has, not stuck into an email
vault.

My "official work related" opinion is summed up in the National Archives
of Australia Advice "Email archiving solutions are not recordkeeping
solutions" available at
http://www.naa.gov.au/recordkeeping/rkpubs/advices/advice69.html.
(Disclaimer - I wrote the advice.)

The more places you store records, the more places you have to worry
about managing. Different systems for different methods of transmitting
records does not make any sense to me at all.

John Lovejoy
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My views, not theirs

-----Original Message-----
From: Hurst, Ruth [mailto:[log in to unmask]] 
Sent: Friday, May 18, 2007 1:14 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [RM] E-Mail destruction?

After reading the discourse on e-mail business rules, I do have a
question. We are looking at implementing an e-mail vaulting solution as
the third phase of our records management project. We have implemented
Stellent/Oracle URM and PRM, are using it now for physical records
management and working on bringing our Stellent EDMS under the records
retention program in URM. The e-mail is the next challenge. 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. How do you handle this and is there a way to delete e-mails
so that they are "really destroyed" and cannot be retrieved in any
situations? If not is there any legal advantage to covering e-mail
records with the retention schedule, even if they can be retrieved after
"destruction"?  

Thank you
Ruth Hurst
Team Leader, Document Services
Phone: 367-5028
Fax: 579-0964

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