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Document Retention And E-mail
innocent_white_lamb writes "An interesting column by Jim Carroll about email within companies, document retention, how hard it is to actually get rid of an email, and how all of this can come back to bite you later on. "
So what is the lesson here? If you are planning on committing fraud, illegally maintaining a monopoly, or postponing a defective product recall to maximize profit, you should first make sure you have a document 'retention' policy? And then everything will be OK? What is wrong with this picture?
What about a story on the benefits of keeping old emails? I'm tired of hearing about the costs.
Fucking lawyers. Oh, my mistake. It isn't the lawyers, it is the legislators. Fucking legislators. Oh, my mistake. It isn't the legislators, it's the voters. Fucking voters. There, that's better.
jkljkl
One of my company's senior managers started keeping a copy of every e-mail he sent or received because he got burned in the usual "you said this..., no that is'nt what I said..." that goes on in any office. After 2 years he had 6Gb in his Outlook .pst file.
I find it fascinating that people openly discuss ways of destroying evidence in case of possible legal action. Is this going to be a standard MBA course from now on: "How to cover your tracks" or "Case Studies: Failures in Shredding Policy from Watergate to Enron"?
It makes you wonder why nobody looks at it from the opposite side. If you don't do anything illegal then your e-mail archive could prove valuable for your own defense. Trading companies, for example, keep all records of customer interaction, including phone calls, for use in the event of a dispute. You can never claim that your broker did something without authorisation because they archive everything.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
It's also annoying because I get a lot of informational mail that I "need" to keep. So it's either print them out or lose them. Well it would be if it worked right.
Check out the message from Sealand offering its services to the US in the fight against terrorism. Laugh ? I nearly fell off my chair.
Jamie Zawinski has a rather unpleasant story about this on his site:
http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/rbarip.html
A very good example of how essentially harmless email can be seriously misinterpreted.
Yes. Most of our clients for email use secure imap with mail kept on the server, or use web-based mail systems (which offer ticketing and other features as well)
The ultimate system would involve secure laptops with no local unencrypted state -- using RAM for cache, and/or encrypted disk, but requiring connections to a non-US location to unlock the encrypted disk each time the machine is used. You could easily replicate the unlock servers for fault tolerance, and with a cell modem you can easily get a few hundred bytes exchanged from almost anywhere. Desktops and local servers could be handled the same way -- no local unencrypted state when powered off, and no way to unlock them without positive assistance from outside the jurisdiction, which would be revoked if there is evidence of an attack.
Emails can be forged so easily, how is their authenticity established?
I guess any decent sysadmin in the world could show the court a whole bunch of threatening emails from the CEO of his company, what would a court do in such a case?
Look, that's why there's rules, understand? So that you think before you break 'em. (Terry Pratchett)
Another aspect to this that seldom gets mentioned is the notion of one-sided archiving: Two people in negotiations have a dispute about how the e-mail-based conversations went, and only one can produce the prior e-mails (and often selectively at that, leaving out the ones that don't support his/her side of the argument).
About the only solution is to be as careful as you can about what you put into e-mail (in all iffy situations make explicit references to all pertinent correspondence and other docs), and make sure you can retrieve everything from your past e-mail when needed.
Firstly, users ability to deal with an increasing volume of business email varies enormously.
Some people are super efficient - their inbox is virtually always empty, anything they need to keep is moved more or less straight away to a permanent folder related to the subject, and anything they don't want to keep is deleted.
If I look over my shoulder at some of my more senior (chronologically speaking) colleagues, their inboxes are a mess. They can't recall email on a particular topic, they don't process incoming email into sensible subjects, they just let it pile up. Then I hear them complaining that they get too much email.
Secondly (and perhaps more ontopic) is the matter of physical document retention.
Many companies simply retain everything, and the cost of storing these documents mounts up and mounts up. People have the attitude that "we might need it some day". Yes, you might.
But you might not.
Cost of storage of every document ad infinitum = $x.
Cost of impact of not having a document at some arbitrary time in the future = $y.
If $y is less than $x then why are you keeping every document by default?
Or don't you know what x and y are?
I think.
A corporation is a legal construct designed to give a business the same rights as a person, right? If so, in the face of a subpoena duces tecum, why can't a corporation plead the fifth amendment? I assume there's a clear legal answer, but IANAL.
This post is completely miss-leading, even assuming 'HavenCo' have a legit claim to be off-shore.
Placing/using an email Server 'off-shore' offers not more protection than refusing to hand over the messages in the first place, you will be in contempt of court and go to jail until you agree to turn them over. FACT!
Causing the destruction of evidence is a crime, in most countries, even if it is carried out by an agent. So in most cases, all 'HavenCo' will achieve is to further incriminate.
BTW: How does a mindless commercial plug warrent +5 Interesting ?
Back in the days when I first began using email on UNIX, I realized that
1) far too many people had root access to the email servers;
2) far too many people could put sniffers/tcpdump on the ethernet; and
3) far too much mail transited through university campuses (Rutgers Univ comes to mind)
We came to realize, and to advise our management, that email was public speech.
Anything you said was subject to being overheard and repeated. That applies to recipients who forward mail, too.
The same eventually was realized about voice mail.
Encryption (usually) doesn't control recipients storing and forwarding your messages.