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Boston City Government Discovers Email Retention

Posted by Soulskill on from the hey-those-stacks-of-emails-take-up-a-lot-of-space dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The Boston Globe, covering a battle to unseat the 16-year incumbent mayor, has found out that the city has no email retention policy. A city official who receives hundreds of emails a day was found to have only 18 emails in his mailbox. The city has enabled journaling on its Exchange server in response. The Globe also notes that they had to curtail requests for emails under the Open Records law because for each mailbox, 'City officials estimated they would charge $5,000 for six months worth of email.'"

2 of 184 comments (clear)

  1. Shouldn't be a surprise to anybody in Boston... by ivan256 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    In the recent debate he claimed there was no evidence he was corrupt. I guess this show's it's 'cause he deletes most of it...

    When confronted with the fact that he sold city property to two of his friends for really cheap, he said that it was "only two out of hundreds of deals". I guess it's OK to break the law if you only do it a couple percent of the time?

    Best part? He's going to win again.

    Seems to me that the bigger the city, the more stupid the voters are...

  2. Retention is the BIG issue by redelm · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Since very little is monitored LIVE because it is extremely expensive, retention time of email, logs, etc. is crucial. Too long and you encourage witchhunts from the past, too short and you abet felonies.

    The real problem is is that law makers (and enforcement) often think themselves above the law. They made/enforced it, so can change/ignore it. Worse, the punishments for such violations is almost always minor. "Whaddyou gonna doo 'bout it?"

    A simple answer is to charge felony "obstruction of justice", and have the felony provisions remove from office. This is highly unlikely to happen for reasons of "good buddy" through to not causing excessive fear in the bureaucracy.