You've Got Mail -- Tons Of It

Daniel Goldman writes "The Baltimore Sun has an article about the City of Baltimore's email problem." A snippet: "Millions of old e-mail messages are clogging Baltimore's municipal computers, so the city is going to start automatically deleting any messages older than 90 days. A common practice in private business, the move raises questions when made by a municipality, which has a responsibility to retain certain public records." Goldman points out "Just think about all the potential law suits; 'if it's not there, they can't subpoena it.'"

Comments

Did they even Look for offline soultions?

[Ohm2k]

Working at a law firm we have to keep everything for 7 years. We have a system in place that takes all mail over 90 days old pulls it out of exchange and move it to the SAN. As a plus it puts a link back into the information store to make it look like the message is still there. User wants a Old message he can still get it himself w/o a IT person having to do dig up a tame, restore the file and the e-mailing it to him (Thus creating MORE mail). The messages are still searchable and it makes retrival when needed a snap.

Mind you, we are only a 700 user shop. But nothing gets deleted. If it gets buy the spam filter it gets saved.