Earl, in our environment, a significant portion of conditional retention records are fairly well defined in terms of required documents, workflow, audit dates, sign-offs, etc.... For example, contracts, grant documentation, and certain financial records. Then we have administrative records series related to the day to day administration of the contract, the grant, the financial process, etc... Unless you have situations where, for example, contracts are being approved by email, my sense is most email is more routine/administrative in nature, and not part of the formal documentation requirement or workflow (if you do have these situations, the process needs to be changed, or formalized to ensure such documentation gets out of the email stream and into the appropriate system. I'm sorry folks, but if people can't handle the rare or specific occasions such a situation would occur, they should be subject to disciplinary action - this is an inappropriate use of email). We apply the conditional retentions to the formal processes, then develop, in partnership with the users, administrative retentions that are can reasonably be expected to cover the business need during the course of a typical contract + the retention. So, for example, a contract administration record series may have a 10 year retention (termination of a typical 3-4 year contract + 6 years; in my opinion, the latter piece doesn't necessarily have to coincide with the conditional retention, but most users feel more comfortable if it does). I see this as a primarily operational retention, with the more formal legal/fiscal value conditional retention applying to the more formally structured record series/process. To my knowledge, this has worked well - the safety valve is in the agency approval process we use upon disposition - in general, the agencies will know if there is a potential issue, and we will simply put the disposition on hold until the next disposition cycle, and this does happen on occasion. Having said that, we have not applied such a system to email beyond training/policy (we are applying it to other electronic formats), but we are about to. Dwight Wallis, CRM Records Administrator Multnomah County Records Management Program 1620 SE 190th Avenue Gresham, OR 97233 phone: (503)988-3741 fax: (503)988-3754 [log in to unmask] List archives at http://lists.ufl.edu/archives/recmgmt-l.html Contact [log in to unmask] for assistance To unsubscribe from this list, click the below link. If not already present, place UNSUBSCRIBE RECMGMT-L or UNSUB RECMGMT-L in the body of the message. mailto:[log in to unmask]