Slashdot Mirror
Are There Any Smart E-mail Retention Policies?
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?"
1. Relocate your company to another country with better laws and without the "Sue! Sue! Sue!" culture. ...
2.
3. Probably less profit, the taxes are likely to be higher than the USA.
The moronic IT persons are already saying crap like "the email belongs to the company, not you". Perhaps the computer on which I wrote them does, but *I* have written those emails, therefore they belong to me also.
I have always archived everything I wrote and every document I produced in my work on an external hard drive, that I took with me when I switched jobs. I have the first piece of email of my first job, 10 years ago. I have everything, but that's only for my personal use and reference. There is a value to me in archiving it. Nobody can prevent me from archiving emails that *I* wrote or received. Nobody. And nobody can force me to hand over those. I will destroy them if I have to.
Oh, and f^@k the IT people.
Ya know, it's people like you that make life difficult for the rest of us that are just following the rules set out for us by the people above. I'll bet you're a developer, right? Therefore you walk on water, and we should all bow before your mighty brain.
Have fun in pound-me-in-the-ass prison after you're cited for contempt of court, you asshole.
your friendly neighborhood IT person.
If these guys are scared of hanging onto their emails, they probably have something to be scared of, and it's not just discovery in the law case sense. It's discovery of actual crimes, and you're going to be an accessory to one sooner rather than later if you keep working there.
What part of "A well regulated militia" do you not understand?
When the company has essentially gone "paperless", email gets used for everything. That includes work directives, requirements documents, policy statements, HR information. and almost everything that used to require a paper form. If you think I'm going to sacrifice myself on the altar of blind obedience to authority, you are naive.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat