Good afternoon (or morning, depending on where you are) - 

I apologize if this has recently been discussed, and would appreciate 
direction to the appropriate string.

I am working as the first Records Coordinator (their term) in a small (less 
than 175 employees) private company that specializes in real estate and 
financing.  The company originally started with five people, and in many 
ways, still runs like that.

In the year or so that I've been here, I've introduced an RM policy, draft 
retention schedule, and outsourced paper storage from several u-store 
sheds to a formal RM storage provider.  All of these were revolutionary to 
most of my coworkers, as no formal thought had been given to RM (with a 
few exceptions) at this company in the past.

I have recently been asked to look at email archiving and retention, with 
an eye to reducing the total number of emails currently in storage (much 
as I was asked to do with paper documents).  There is no history of formal 
archival or retention for emails, and it has gotten to the point where 
Outlook is unstable because of the total amount of email currently being 
managed in inboxes and folders.

Even more interesting, the email tends to be a combination of company 
work, contact management, and personal; because the executives here 
have such tight ties to our clients and investors, many emails contain 
elements of all three.  Add to this a "just in case" mentality that is proven 
at least once a month (you should hear the Dave Matthews story I just 
heard), and I have an interesting dilemma.

For those of you that have or are thinking about implementing email 
retention, can you give me some ideas on the following:

1.  How can I discuss the deletion of emails (ephemera) with executives 
when many of those ephemeral contacts have been used later on by them 
to retrieve contact information and other data used for completely 
different reasons and projects?  This is also the case with their personal 
desk/cabinet files.

2.  Understanding that I really don't want to keep everything, is there a 
product that could present the end user with a simple set of buckets (no 
more than 3-5)?

3.  What is a good way(s) to set up training or at least a conversation 
about sorting email at the user end, when the general feeling is that 
nothing should be thrown away?

I think that most of the executives in our company feel that their email is 
a history of their work, and of the company, and are very unwilling to let 
any of it go.  Many employees are instructed to print emails and put them 
in the appropriate paper file, but then keep the email as well.  

I appreciate that these are not simple questions, but would appreciate the 
discussion.   Thanks to all of you.

Shannon Sobota, MLIs

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