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?"

Comments

Shoot the Lawyers

[Detritus]

I used to work for a company that decided to delete all email after 30 days. While I'm sure it made the lawyers happy, it made life difficult for anyone who was trying to actually do work. Email archives are important as a record of decisions, requirements, purchases, agreements with customers, and company policy directives. Sometimes people and corporations conveniently "forget" what they said months, or years, ago. If I can't keep it in my mailbox, I'm going to print it out and store it in a safe location.