Simple E-Mail Retention Policy
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@Breffni-Potter said:
@Dashrender said:
Yes, but as previously mentioned, keeping email for the sake of keeping email is pretty bad, especially if it's likely to be subpoena'ed.
This is assuming that your company is or will do something bad, so let's make sure there is no evidence lying around.
It sounds like, let's get rid of the CCTV in case our CEO is caught on film doing something naughty. Don't understand the logic behind this.
Not quite. It's that there is little good but lots of risk to come from having old emails. Why increase liability if you don't need to? Why store old emails if you don't need to? Why retain records that are potentially dangerous for no reason?
Keep in mind, that if you store too much email, the risk might not be that you did something bad, but that someone accuses you of it and you are not liable for storing, retrieving and searching all of that email. Proving you didn't do something is harder the more email you have to verify to do it.
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The cost of email archiving is comparatively cheap compared with the cost of mounting a legal defence when you have no evidence to protect yourself.
The use of email archiving from a management point of view is amazing, when you are looking after 120 sites over a 10 year period, all with differing issues and technologies, having an email trial of who said what, who did what and when is very useful.
When engineer X in 2009 made a change, we can look back and see why he recommended that change.
Is email archiving for everyone? Definitely not.
I had one incident with a company who had a 7 seven figure contract for a very long term project, retrieving those emails from 2012 meant that a huge amount of money was not lost. They now have an email archiving solution for such incidents.
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@Breffni-Potter said:
The cost of email archiving is comparatively cheap compared with the cost of mounting a legal defence when you have no evidence to protect yourself.
Archiving isn't the cost. Discovery is the cost.
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If there was a chance at a loss of a 7 figure contract if you couldn't find the email then you had/have much more severe problems besides email archiving.
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@Breffni-Potter said:
I had one incident with a company who had a 7 seven figure contract for a very long term project, retrieving those emails from 2012 meant that a huge amount of money was not lost. They now have an email archiving solution for such incidents.
Coming from big banking, email retention is not encouraged
The cost of saving unnecessary emails is huge. And the biggest cost is that you somehow fail to keep them or they don't get kept consistently. The longer you archive, the more the risk goes up. -
@scottalanmiller said:
Archiving isn't the cost. Discovery is the cost.
if the lawyers are involved, sure.
With one email archive box I used, emails from 2007 to 2014, in and out. Took a minute or 2 to find what I needed. It's like google-fu.
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@Dashrender said:
If there was a chance at a loss of a 7 figure contract if you couldn't find the email then you had/have much more severe problems besides email archiving.
bwahahaha
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@Breffni-Potter said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Archiving isn't the cost. Discovery is the cost.
if the lawyers are involved, sure.
That's pretty much what all email retention discussions are around. The primary discussion in the US around email retention is only about legal hold and discovery, nothing else. It is so risky and so expensive that everything else is pointless to really consider.
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@Dashrender said:
If there was a chance at a loss of a 7 figure contract if you couldn't find the email then you had/have much more severe problems besides email archiving.
Not the whole contract but many companies do have problems.
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@Breffni-Potter said:
With one email archive box I used, emails from 2007 to 2014, in and out. Took a minute or 2 to find what I needed. It's like google-fu.
The concern is not finding "something", it is proving that there is "nothing."
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@scottalanmiller said:
Coming from big banking, email retention is not encouraged
2008
drops the mic, walks off stage
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
If there was a chance at a loss of a 7 figure contract if you couldn't find the email then you had/have much more severe problems besides email archiving.
bwahahaha
I'm not sure what this means?
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@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
If there was a chance at a loss of a 7 figure contract if you couldn't find the email then you had/have much more severe problems besides email archiving.
bwahahaha
I'm not sure what this means?
Nor I.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Breffni-Potter said:
With one email archive box I used, emails from 2007 to 2014, in and out. Took a minute or 2 to find what I needed. It's like google-fu.
The concern is not finding "something", it is proving that there is "nothing."
Exactly - look at the Hilary thing - she's trying to prove that classified stuff was never sent to her personal non protected account. Which is pretty much impossible to prove.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
If there was a chance at a loss of a 7 figure contract if you couldn't find the email then you had/have much more severe problems besides email archiving.
bwahahaha
I'm not sure what this means?
Nor I.
I know what my statement means, but I don't understand your laughing.. did I miss something?
Maybe you're laughing in agreement?
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@Breffni-Potter said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Coming from big banking, email retention is not encouraged
2008
drops the mic, walks off stage
eh?
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@scottalanmiller said:
The concern is not finding "something", it is proving that there is "nothing."
It's an absurdity. How can a court say "Prove you did not do this" - Imagine being sued for selling racist neo nazi sports-wear, would the court ask you to prove you did not sell them? Or would the burden of proof be on the plantiff?
@Dashrender said:
Exactly - look at the Hilary thing - she's trying to prove that classified stuff was never sent to her personal non protected account. Which is pretty much impossible to prove.
Whatever happened to innocent until proven guilty? Maybe they should arrest people at random for shop-lifting and ask "can you prove you did NOT steal those sweets?"
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@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
If there was a chance at a loss of a 7 figure contract if you couldn't find the email then you had/have much more severe problems besides email archiving.
bwahahaha
I'm not sure what this means?
Nor I.
I know what my statement means, but I don't understand your laughing.. did I miss something?
Maybe you're laughing in agreement?
I didn't laugh, I just said that I didn't understand either.
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@Dashrender said:
@Breffni-Potter said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Coming from big banking, email retention is not encouraged
2008
drops the mic, walks off stage
eh?
A small financial crash which left many unemployed and various folks financial worse off. So it's no surprise that the industry largely responsible for such a crash doesn't want to leave a paper trial of what it does.
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@Breffni-Potter said:
It's an absurdity. How can a court say "Prove you did not do this" - Imagine being sued for selling racist neo nazi sports-wear, would the court ask you to prove you did not sell them? Or would the burden of proof be on the plantiff?
Welcome to the evils of living under places based on British common law. It's the worst.
With email, in the US at least, you have to be able to prove that you have retained everything and then either search it, pay to search it or let the opposition search it (depending on the scenario I assume) and often all three. When you retain email you risk exposure because someone else might subpoena your emails!! Email retention is a big risk, even if you don't do anything wrong here.
