A couple a days ago I posted an article about short term email retention and its dangers but as I said in that article a “Keep it Forever” strategy is equally dangerous. It may seem like an easy way out because of the increased scrutiny of email records by government investigators and litigants. To be certain, there are regulatory requirements for email management and there are in many cases where strong penalties for failing to comply with the regulations have been applied.  Companies have been fined, individuals imprisoned and additional penalties assessed for failing to properly manage emails and other electronic data according to their regulatory requirements.

At the same time, many companies have suffered significant losses from email kept beyond their legal retention period.  For decades companies have had extensive paper record management systems that categorized, store and destroy physical records in accordance with regulatory requirements.  Given the rigorous and costly systems that have been established to manage physical records it is surprising that there seems to be so much resistance to properly managing electronic records in a similar manner.  Especially, since electronic solutions can be so labor saving and cost effective.

In some cases, the extended life of records is the result of being to busy working on other more pressing needs.  We have all heard the story of the stash of duplicate tapes in a cabinet that became evidence in a court case.  Or the racks of old tapes in an archive that should have been destroyed long ago, but weren’t. 

Another form of lurking record retention is in .pst files and downloaded emails on laptops and desktops.  These files exist outside company records management systems and represent potential liability.  In a recent case with investigators, an entire department’s desktop computers were subpoenaed and confiscated because of evidence that there were files pertinent to a government investigation.

Protect yourselves and your company and act aggressively about records management and the use of .pst files.  A properly designed email management system will allow all users adequate access to any email that should still be in the archive.  In fact a properly implemented Email Management system actually improves performance and reduces storage utilization and costs.

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