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Are There Any Smart E-mail Retention Policies?
Posted by
timothy
on Sat Jul 26, 2008 06:30 PM
from the don't-use-email-any-more dept.
from the don't-use-email-any-more dept.
An anonymous reader writes "In an age of litigation and costly discovery obligations, many organizations are embracing policies which call for the forced purging of e-mail in an attempt to limit the organization's exposure to legal risk. I work for a large organization which is about to begin destroying all e-mail older than 180 days. Normally, I would just duck the house-cleaning by archiving my own e-mail to hard-drive or a network folder, but we are a Microsoft shop and the Exchange e-mail server is configured to deny all attempts to copy data to an off-line personal folder (.PST file). The organization's policy unhelpfully recommends that 'really important' e-mails be saved as Word documents. Is anybody doing this right? What do Slashdot readers suggest for a large company that needs to balance legal risks against the daily information and communication needs of its staff?"
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Submission: Are There Any Smart E-mail Retention Policies? by Anonymous Coward
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imap? (Score:3, Interesting)
if your orgs exchange server has their imap connector enabled, you can use a different client that doesn't follow the commands of the exchange server to pull emails, but it sounds to me like your org is smarter than that.
Re:imap? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not unreasonable in such a litigious society.
In a litigious society, wouldn't it be best to save all of your email, so you can use it to protect yourself in court?
If you're deleting all your email, then the only evidence that will come out in court will be from the people suing you.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
So overall it would be a net gain for such companies.
Alternatively:
Maybe the company has such crappy lawyers that they allow the court to see emails out of context.
Or maybe the courts and juries are so crap that they'd take some email rant like "I'm going to kill and bury X" more literally than the writer meant.
Either way it's not a good sign.
It's never a good sign if people don't want to keep the truth aroun
An example: Ant poison (Score:3, Informative)
Here's an example.
A company made ant poision, but the federal regulatory agency made them take it off the market.
Their law firm recommended that they appeal the agency's decision in court, so they did. They lost. The law firm recommended that they appeal to a higher court, so they did. They lost. The law firm recommended that they appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. The company sent a fax telling the law firm not to do it. The law firm appealed to the Supreme Court anyway. They lost.
Doing that, they ran up bi
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Where do you guys live?
I'm building a hosted Email service and one of the things our clients demand is that we be able to keep all email (including the deleted ones) for 7 YEARS.
They site regulatory compliance issues and corporate governance rules that were changed after the whole Enron, Worldcom series of fiascoes.
So what your company and the original questioner's company are doing is illegal in some places. Jamaica only imitated America on this as far as I know but feel free to enlighten me.
adaptation (Score:4, Insightful)
The end result of all the bullshit lawyers try to shove on people who actually produce things for a living is the same. We route around it. This policy will cause people to use webmail, alternative email clients, IM, and other technologies to get on with getting work done, while the lawyers remain blissfully ignorant.
Printers are your friends (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Mod parent up as funny (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Cheating is a bad idea (Score:5, Insightful)
If you don't want to have to go through that extra BS (believe me, you don't) and/or you don't want your company or yourself getting in even more legal trouble when they deny something exists (because it shouldn't according to their policy) when it really does (because you didn't follow the policy) then don't be an ass. Do what they tell you like a good little minion.
How about the reverse problem? (Score:5, Interesting)
The IT staff at my former employer saved copies of all email that went through the server... indefinitely. No, they didn't tell employees they were doing it. And yes, they had a search engine so they could do across the board searches of whatever terms seemed interesting at the time.
I find it interesting that different companies are going to different extremes. Some are limiting their exposure by trying to delete all mail and others are saving all mail in order to be able to comply with court orders (or perhaps just get a bit big brother-ish.
For a REALLY strange twist, the company I'm speaking of forced employees to maintain mailboxes under 100MB... while the server admins never deleted a single email that hit the server.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
My former company began archiving all email permanently due to some lawsuits, and it was the best thing that ever happened to me. FINALLY that 12MB limit on email disappeared. I never could figure out how a major tech company couldn't manage a quota higher than 12MB in this area of cheap storage...
Storage isn't the issue sometimes (Score:3, Insightful)
It's IO. If you don't use a database driven e-mail program, large inboxes hit the disk really hard. Thus you need major IO to have large quotas. We have this problem at work currently. We run sendmail for a number of reasons, the main one being that we got e-mail waaaaaaay back in the day when it was pretty much it. Regardless, we are still on it and thus IO is a significant problem in terms of large inbox quotas. We need to move to a database driven solution, but such a move isn't easy and isn't free and t
Re:Cheating is a bad idea (Score:5, Insightful)
Here is the thing I don't understand...
This is a double edged sword.
It is nice that you won't have incriminating emails around so that people can find them during discovery.
but what happens when you need those same emails that are over 180 days old that would have EXONERATED you?
I guess you just have to say... "oh well, sorry, we don't have a copy of the [warning/caution/acceptance] that puts us in the clear..., I guess we're screwed".
Parent
Re:Cheating is a bad idea (Score:5, Insightful)
but what happens when you need those same emails that are over 180 days old that would have EXONERATED you?
I guess you just have to say... "oh well, sorry, we don't have a copy of the [warning/caution/acceptance] that puts us in the clear..., I guess we're screwed".
It's a fair question, and one I've certainly struggled with. Ultimately, you have to come up with a balancing of the possibilities. On one hand is the possibility that an email over 180 days exonerates you and on the other is an email over 180 days old that sends your executives to prison. The calculation may be that it's harder for someone to prove you guilty, than to be forced to prove yourself innocent. Apparently the balance for this company is at 180 days. That's a bit short for my taste, but that's what this company has decided.
Parent
Re:Cheating is a bad idea (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Absolutely... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Cheating is a bad idea (Score:5, Insightful)
> but what happens when you need those same emails that are over 180 days old that would have EXONERATED you?
Well, obviously this company has decided that old emails are much more likely to work against them, and this even overrides the loss of productivity due to important emails going missing etc. I really wonder what kind of business this company is in, and what their business strategy is :-(
Or maybe it is just one CEO that knows something funny went on, and now he/she is trying to destroy the evidence whatever the cost.
Parent
Re: (Score:3)
Or simply that the emails in question contain information you need more than 180 days later...
Let it be deleted (Score:4, Insightful)
Seriously.
Let the 180 day limit on email remain as 'someone elses problem'. How many times do you really need to get an email six months old? You'll end up with a cleaner, faster and less stressful mailbox.
Of course, there may be the odd email you need, so every week why not look at the oldest week's worth of mail in your mailbox, and anything you REALLY have to keep, just forward it to yourself. Then it will stay in your mailbox for another 180 days. But try to only forward the things that are vital.
Of course you may be able to forward to an offsite mail account, but I'm assuming that isn't allowed. No company is going to restrict you from forwarding emails to your own company account.
Jolyon
Re:Let it be deleted (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I save emails for the same reasons I would save regular mail. If I think it's something that I will need later to CMA then I'm saving it. I should imagine that saving the whole email and not just the text will lend credibility to my side if someone tries to say they never sent/received "that" email.
Since I don't what will come back up 5 years from now I tend to save all of it.
Re:Let it be deleted (Score:5, Insightful)
It's saved my ass more than once. There are few things more satisfying than having a project manager start an email tirade against you because she thinks you didn't tell her about a change that needed to be made later in the year, and being able to forward that old email to her and tell her "yes, I did tell you about it, I even sent you the documentation for it way back when."
Parent
You'd better comply with Sarbanes-Oxley (Score:5, Informative)
And for those of you libertarian-for-yourself, statist-for-big-companies types out there, this is what happens when the government pokes its nose into regulating business; they don't just make Microsoft's life miserable. All aspects of life and business will be intruded upon. That's just how Big Nanny works.
Re:You'd better comply with Sarbanes-Oxley (Score:5, Insightful)
Destroying e-mail - something that used to be a good idea - can now be a crime even absent an active criminal investigation.
Unless the email is destroyed on an ongoing basis as part of a clear and documented policy, which makes it perfectly legal.
Sounds exactly like this "ask slashdot" question.
Parent
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Just say you misplaced the emails. It worked for the Whitehouse and President Bush.
Re:You'd better comply with Sarbanes-Oxley (Score:4, Insightful)
Bring in a lawyer and ask about Sarbanes Oxley, the changes to federal e discovery requirements and your industry specific requirements. Computerworld had a good article about the changes to federal e-discovery here: http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9001219 [computerworld.com] For an example, the FAA has the opinion that copies of all written communications to them should be maintained in the format it was sent. So, a fax would be held on to and an email to them would not be deleted.
"The organization's policy unhelpfully recommends that 'really important' e-mails be saved as Word documents." By that logic, any disgruntled ex-employee can create a Word document with outlandish claims. Then claim it's a copy of an email. Your organization's written policy just opened that avenue of legal attack.
You said large company. Why not capture and archive all e-mail messages -- incoming, outgoing and internal? This approach provides the strongest assurance that all relevant e-mail messages are being captured. It will help increase the confidence of internal and external auditors and regulatory authorities in the integrity of the resulting audit trail. If not, then you do run the risk of a judge impsing a fine because you could not produce evidence.
Parent
Yes, indeed there is one ... (Score:3, Funny)
Retain (store) email just long enough to forward it on to the destination server.
Not a bad idea? (Score:4, Insightful)
I tend to see e-mail as something you use for temporary exchange of messages and tasks/information held therein, not something to be used to archive material.
I'd argue the company's policy isn't actually far wrong, surely anything over about 180 days is something that is more suited to permanent archiving anyway?
I'll admit when I was working in tech support and I had our corporate Microsoft keys e-mailed me I kept them in my personal folders for a couple of years but realistically I have to admit I think these would be better placed in an information repository suited to more permanent store of information.
The company does then of course run the risk of people storing data that puts them at legal risk in that information repository instead however!
I'm not sure though that there are many circumstances where an e-mail client needs to act as a long term information store. I find it's generally the case that if you need to store it for a long while, it'll almost certainly be something that others in your company will need access to should you get hit by a bus tomorrow and as such, maybe shared folders (with appropriate permissions) are a better choice than personal folders?
Sarbanes-Oxley Question (Score:4, Insightful)
You left out something very important. Is your large company publicly traded in the US? If yes, it could be looking at violations of Sarbanes-Oxley if they really are purging (and not retaining) e-mail "in an attempt to limit the organization's exposure to legal risk."
But that is likely not the case. It is more likely the company is trying to limit the amount of data stored on its Exchange system. Adding storage and additional backup capacity is expensive. Implementing a policy that requires end users to keep the size of their mailboxes down does not work, because many people insist they need every bit of those six years of archived e-mail; people use e-mail as much for CYA as doing real business. So, this solution was selected. If it really is important, make the end users do some work to keep it and don't force the company to re architect its storage system to keep years of CYA and personal mail.
Re:Sarbanes-Oxley Question (Score:5, Informative)
Deleting email is just fine with Sarbanes Oxley as long as you have a specified policy and follow it to the letter. It would be okay to have a policy that email is auto-deleted after 30 days, if your company wanted to do that.
What is specifically NOT okay is deleting email once an investigation is underway or if there is reason to believe you will be investigated. In those cases, you have a duty to preservce evidennce. if you delete email under these circumstances for example, the judge may instruct the jury to assume that the email was incrimating or may rule summarily against you. Either way, your company is hosed.
Parent
Your email? Excuse me?? (Score:5, Insightful)
That email belongs to the company, not you. As someone who accumulates 90% of his work stress from dealing with employee email usage atrocities (please don't email an mp3 mix cd image to 150 of your closest friends from your workstation, kthx), let me tell you what's wrong with your plan.
Its company property, governed by the policy in place for whatever reason, feel free to violate the policy if you don't want your job.
Not to mention what will happen if it comes to light that you are violating policy during a discovery proceedure, especially if it comes to light because you brilliantly decided to forward critical confidential company correspondence to somewhere like a Gmail account.
Brilliant. Really. Good luck finding a job after that.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Ha ha not funny. I had to laugh at this. A few years ago I was still mapping drives. I had the "H" (Home) actually-network drive for everyone mapped to one of my servers (huge drives, the server was named Moby Fred) which allowed me to backup everyone's stuff every day pretty nicely on autopilot at night. Also, if someone's box failed I could swap it out with a standard install and not worry about their saved stuff being lost 'cept for maybe bookmarks too bad eat shit. But my nightly backups started to fail
Project Completion and Architectural Decisions (Score:5, Interesting)
* Perpetual archiving of e-mail - wastes server disk space, increases tape backup volume, and (more notoriously) can leave "clues" that predatory litigators salivate over.
* Non-archival of e-mail - internal accusations and decisions can't be resolved, difficult to track decisions and their history, circumventable by printing the e-mail with headers.
The solution is as follows:
1. Digest only the final decisions of e-mails and the essential reasoning thereof, or make a digest of the decisions in a collaborative project wiki where buy-in from the stakeholders can be tracked.
2a. Upon project completion (ISO9000-type project gating), archive all project files, documentation and essential digest e-mails.
2b. Simultaneously destroy all other e-mails using secure forensically-unrecoverable techniques to prevent accidental recovery by thieves.
3. Any other e-mails regarding general architectural or administrative decisions which have implications for future development in the company should be digested, placed on a company wiki, and then the remainder securely destroyed.
Using this method, any questionable or potentially illegal decisions can be greatly avoided or reduced from a purely legal perspective while retaining sufficient information to continue operations and development. This policy won't end all legal issues, but the key is to have procedures that are centered around the guise of IT efficiency and operational simplicity to purposely dispel any other alleged intent by third parties that expressed or implies destruction of future evidence.
It's not just the company you protect (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know how often I've saved my own can by retrieving an email from someone denying one thing or another or if a project goes south due to additional requests. By demanding that all requests be in written form or in email, I can produce a paper trail of all the requirements for a given project. As developers, we do nothing unless we have an official request. This limits our responsibility when things go over budget or behind schedule.
Deleting emails when a project is over is not necessarily a good idea, either. Patterns of irrational and poorly thought out requests can be produced over a long time period and this can also be used to cover one's caboose or even to give priorities to scope creep during crunch time. If things are going slow and they want some feature added in, we might be more inclined to meet that request. But if we're facing hard deadlines, we can push back and make the requester decide which are the most important features to add.
Doesn't belong there. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Doesn't belong there. (Score:4, Insightful)
Email != a document repository. If you need to keep something, print as a PDF or store it somewhere more appropriate.
Perhaps in your parochial world. I'm on assignment in a company that uses Lotus Notes as it is intended to be used, and email is just one more document in a database that is accessible through many views, some of which are not a mail box. Works quite well.
On my last assignment the company routed EVERY email to an archive database, on the advice of their lawyers (not in house, real lawyers).
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Email != a document repository. If you need to keep something, print as a PDF or store it somewhere more appropriate.
I couldn't agree more. If you got interesting or useful data - make a wiki, use sharepoint, or get it somewhere that will make it useful.
Re:Doesn't belong there. - I disagree (Score:3, Insightful)
Email != a document repository. If you need to keep something, print as a PDF or store it somewhere more appropriate.
I disagree.
Once you remove email from the mail server, you loose quite a bit of it's (informational) value.
* the header information is lost.
That includes information like:
* when
* from who
* who else got the email
* the text and attachments tend to g
Go with the flow (Score:4, Insightful)
Is anybody doing this right? (Score:3, Funny)
Yes. I save them in notepad.
Horrible policy (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Horrible policy (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Sounds like a bad policy to me (Score:3, Informative)
How many cases have there been where email evidence was used to nail the guilty bastards?
So tell me, is it really a good thing for emails to be deleted?
What does it tell you about the company? It has lots of guilty bastards? Do you want to continue working in such a company? They could blame _YOU_ for something and if you're innocent where's the evidence to protect you? If you're keeping your evidence against company policy have a nice day
As for personal emails, I try to keep most personal emails. Hard disk space is cheap, so why bother taking the time to figure out whether an email is important or not?
You might not even want to bother deleting spam - some people keep a store of spam so that they can test/tune antispam systems/filters.
Lastly, I think many people do work with projects that last more than 6 months. Sometimes your memory might fail, sometimes your boss's memory might fail, sometimes your colleagues forget.
And sometimes when people ask the same questions it's convenient to just dig out the reply/explanation and resend it (email programs should have a decent and fast search - kmail is too slow). If it keeps happening maybe you put it in a FAQ somewhere and then you might add a link to it
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Way to be a jerk. Slashdot isn't only about the latest iPhone release, or patent trolling. It's about everything technical, and this is good question.
I'm a big fan of plain text email and copy and past really isn't all that time consuming if I were forced to save anything worth saving for longer than 180 days.
Stuff that matters (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Don't break the law... (Score:5, Insightful)
It isn't just about breaking the law. Someone sends an email to a coworker, telling them "I suppose that if someone is using our Webelfetzer 1000 while hopping up and down on one foot in the shower, they might slip, and bang their head," and then a year later someone is using a Webelfetzer 1000 while hopping up and down on one foot in the shower, and they slip and bang their head, and sue, and their lawyer finds the old email, and screams: "See! You knew this was a threat, and you didn't warn anybody!" and then doubles the damages they're asking for.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)