Back in the olden days before voice mail, telephone detail used to be one of the first things we would be asked to pull together when we started a document production. Phone detail & expense statements - who have you been talking to and who have you had lunch with. I've produced the same records here and recently. I can see interest in voice mail whether or not the message is still there. Just the fact a call has been received from a particular number could be valuable to someone. But of course there are several ways to get the same information. Unified Messaging is a great convenience. Personally I love it. At home I have Comcast not only for cable TV, but internet and phone service as well. I can access my email and my voice mail on the web through any PC. Very cool. I carry a Blackberry for work. Again I can access my messages, voice or data, from anywhere there is service. Ok, so where in the heck am I going with this? It would seem to me you would want your voice mail "stubs" to be retained for the same length of time as your overall phone voice detail. But then again, I'm thinking why retain a stub? If you're looking at your messaging system organically, should you not retain everything for the same time? ***PLEASE NOTE THAT I KNOW SOME EMAILS & POSSIBLY VOICE MAILS ARE RECORDS AND SHOULD BE RETAINED FOR WHATEVER TIMEFRAME YOUR RETENTION SCHEDULE STATES*** - I'm talking about the messaging system itself. (this would normally be the fine print at the bottom of the contract but I wanted you all to see it). Last week the list was talking about an email archive. Using an email archiving tool that has been implemented properly you can manage your messaging in a manner that will facilitate compliance with a policy setup as I described in high level above. I'll be more experienced in this soon as we will be installing ours in a couple weeks. Rock on! Sharon Burnett Seattle WA PS Saw Robben Ford last week. He was good! List archives at http://lists.ufl.edu/archives/recmgmt-l.html Contact [log in to unmask] for assistance