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?"
Print every email you get, I'm sure it won't effect your bonus.
My company gets a lot of material for jobs via email. The email gets printed out and attached to a carbonless job form. The details from the email are written on the job form (plus extra details we need to do the job). When the job is done, this paper monstrosity is sent to billing, including the email. On top of this we want to search the details of the job, so we scan the docket into the computer after the job is done. We scan the email as well. So what started out as 8KB of text ends up as 300KB-800KB of images, with a lot of extra work in between. Never underestimate to power of business to create work.