Email archiving / retention time 6

[geesamand]

My company is finally putting an email retention policy in place. This is to limit legal costs in the event of a lawsuit and also to keep our email system costs in line.

For the last 15 years I've simply kept all email within my Inbox and relied on searching. Call it the Gmail philosophy, I dunno it works for me and I can recall correspondence from several years ago with general ease. So now I'm challenged to sort my email per the retention policy or just lose everything older than 3 years.

Further, I used to download email by year to a .pst file that I'd keep as a DVD in my desk drawer. I'm told off-line copies are against policy.

Anyone have advice how to get from "here" to "there"? The big purge is in 2 months.

Thanks,

David

 

[drawoh]

...

For the last 15 years I've simply kept all email within my Inbox and relied on searching.

...

Wow! You are going to have fun cleaning that up.

I firmly believe in archiving emails. I occasionally look for stuff I wrote a long time ago. Given the cost of disk storage these days, I suspect that your company is determined to not have old emails lying around, for legal reasons. Maybe the best thing is to wait and let the purge do its thing.

--
JHG

 

[jayrod12]

Our company uses GFI archiver. I literally don't have to do anything. It automatically archives everything. I'm just obligated to file emails into project folders as appropriate. GFI archiver is essentially the backup.

Anything directly project related is filed through our Newforma Project Centre. This program keeps track of correspondence, transmittals, shop drawing reviews, etc. It's also a fairly slick program. It's one button in Outlook to file emails.

 

[MacGyverS2000]

Just wait until the bean counters see the bill for work that needs to be redone due to a purged email... it won't happen overnight, but it WILL happen. Then the real fun begins.

Dan - Owner

http://www.Hi-TecDesigns.com

 

[HamburgerHelper]

No. The cost to a bean counter of a potential imaginary lawsuit always supersedes realworld cost no matter the amount.

 

[geesamand]

Work needing to be redone is very real but also extremely squishy and arguable. The time required to adhere to a tight email retention policy (non value-add time) is similarly hard to pinpoint. Cost of lawsuits is comparatively easy to quantify and scare higher management. I'm too pragmatic to charge that hill and go to battle over it.

I would like to know how other engineers assess what is "essential" and worthy of a longer retention vs. simply keeping it all or let it all get deleted. And with historical emails - what you did about those.

To be clear, I do not have several years' email in one folder. I have been segregating it by calendar year to keep it manageable. However I had not categorized my emails in a way that relates to its retention value.

 

[zdas04]

I was a PROFS user on the mainframe from 1980 to 1992 when we went to Outlook. I still have all of my PROFS e-mails (about half of the people I remember from those tomes are dead) and all of my outlook files from before I retired. The lawyers hate me. But still today I get a "do you remember ..." question that I can answer in one of the archives (I had one just today). I never had a company lawyer say "you HAVE to purge", they always said "you NEED to purge" and I always felt like "need" was low enough grade that I didn't really need to. Some of that crap is still interesting. I have purged the SPAM many times over the years, but I've gotten rid of very few e-mails that were addressed to me instead of "occupant". This document-retention garbage is counter to effective access to information.

[bold]David Simpson, PE[/bold]
MuleShoe Engineering

In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. Galileo Galilei, Italian Physicist

 

[JNieman]

To be fair... Being counter to effective access of information is exactly /why/ lawyers suggest it.

 

[IRstuff]

Dirty laundry stays dirty if you keep it in a bin. Getting rid of it ensures that someone else doesn't find a big stinking pile of stuff.

As the numerous email leaks over the past few years have demonstrated, even relatively innocuous email chains can be re-interpreted and re-imagined into nefarious conspiracies.

TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg

faq731-376 forum1529

 

[ornerynorsk]

Ethically, it's not your decision whether to keep it or not, in my opinion. If you decide not to follow company mandate and end up keeping stuff that later is found out, your posterior may be in a sling, not to mention whatever pitfall it may create for the company.

It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong, than to be always right by having no ideas at all.

 

[cvg]

some people actually print and file emails...

you can purge all your emails but there are nearly always copies on another device somewhere that you are unaware of. recent events have proven that

 

[controlnovice]

I ran into this issue too. Problem was, IT set the policy so email couldn't be kept more than 1 year....and I had projects lasting more than 5 years.

I go against policy and save my email anyway. I know it's there to protect the company... I keep mine to protect myself. I'm not going to rely on anyone else to remember what happened...not even Wikileaks...

______________________________________________________________________________
This is normally the space where people post something insightful.

 

[Sparweb]

Geesamand, are you the type to put the correct cover page format on your TPS reports?

... I used to download email by year to a .pst file that I'd keep as a DVD in my desk drawer. I'm told off-line copies are against policy...

Who's looking through your desk drawer?
And if they do find a DVD that you have carefully labelled "cutest cat photos of 2014", why should they get excited?
Even if they do try to access the DVD, they will be disappointed that the video won't play, despite your efforts to carefully name that 12 GB file with the correct ".VOB" extension.

Simple steps like these will rule out discovery by anyone who is neither nosy nor resourceful enough to discover what's on that DVD.

You've asked this question because you know you have your own interests to look out for. Read the advice from Controlnovice above - ask yourself if you believe the same thing.

STF

 

[FreddyNurk]

Actually I read the retention issue differently, in terms of keeping records rather than ensuring that they're purged, so as to keep appropriate records in archive and with the project.

That said, at least one of my former employers had a much smaller storage allocation (i.e. 400Mb ) so my mailbox would stop receiving emails when full and I'd have to purge them. I also did as controlnovice did, and kept my own copies of correspondence. I was most unimpressed when a later employer blocked the Outlook install so I couldn't archive to .pst either. That company had their own archiving system per users mailbox. I also recall issues with local .pst storage and Outlook losing its brain if the local storage gets beyond a certain size, which was also motivation for IT to enforce retention restrictions.

To be honest though, I don't see what the issue is with turfing emails or having a short retention period (even 90 days). In all the cases I can think of, the email should be stored separately (ideally indexed and recorded centrally so others can see it) if its work related, rather than relying on individual mailboxes as a proxy storage medium for work related correspondence. If that's done, then short retention periods are no issue at all. Same with archiving to relevant formats for personal records as needed.

 

[ehbadger]

I get to keep emails for 2 years. Then it is automatically deleted.
Oh and the archiving and exporting functions are completely disabled. The only way to actually save an email is drag it to the local hard drive as a file... meaning you lose all timestamps/searchability/metadata, etc.

Super great fun especially since major shutdown/turnarounds are 2+ years apart.

 

[BUGGAR]

Do "Whistle Blower" laws apply? I guess this should be on a legal site. And I guess it depends on the information you may have and who it help or hurts.

 

[cvg]

with the low price of storage these days, the only reason to purge or "archive" files before a project is finished is liability. And archiving really does not reduce liability or cost. that said, 99% of all emails are not worth keeping. The important ones can be easily pdf'd, or printed, or copied to the project files on a one by one basis. Better yet, any decisions should be documented in a decision log and not just in an email.

 

[HamburgerHelper]

I might question whose liability. If a bridge collapsed and I was the PE on the design, having an email that shows that I instructed the contractor to do such and such would be very helpful if it was my head on the stick.

 

[Ron]

Emails go to someone or are received from someone. In many cases, for legal purposes, those "someones" might not have a retention policy and have a zillion emails that someone can subpoena to get what YOU said anyway. While I try not to keep a lot of emails, there are some that are worth keeping for definitive purposes, as controlnovice noted.

Retention policies are just another way of someone in a corporate position showing how important they are to the company. Mostly worthless.

 

[GregLocock]

My employer imposed a retention policy after one court case involved the opposing counsel reading (and charging for reading) 7000 boxes of documents, many of which were identical, just from different people's desks.

Cheers

Greg Locock


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