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

 

[Agent666]

People seem to forget about the fact the other guy you sent the email to has a copy of the email and will probably be keeping it for a century and you can't make them erase it. I fail to see the point in forcing the deletion at just one end. The lawyers will be at the other end.

 

[MacGruber22]

I spent a lot of time trying to find a easy way to organize emails for myself and to facilitate transfer to our public project email folders. I found a method for me that keeps me from pulling my hair out when retaining emails and has really helped me stay organized.

My firm has a public folder organized by year with project subfolders labeled with job number. I use the "categories" labeling with a color. I create a category when a new job comes in and also create a search folder that captures incoming and outgoing mail. Each time I send an email or receive one that I consider worth keeping, I label with the appropriate job label. Apparently, there is an endless number of colors in Outlook to label with - I have yet to find a limit; so far so good. Every 2 weeks on Friday, I copy the labeled emails to their respective public folders. THEN...I label those emails with a category called "copied to public folder". That way I know which emails I already copied over and how many are remaining to do so.

I used to dread keeping track of emails, but now I really, dare I say, enjoy it.

"It is imperative Cunth doesn't get his hands on those codes."

 

[LionelHutz]

I've got a couple of scripts we use at work to either save selected emails or save a whole folder of emails. They save the email with the file name "sent date - sent time - sender - subject.msg". Basically, add the script as a VBA module and then create a custom toolbar button to access it. For the save individual emails we just select the emails and then hit the save button. It asks for the directory and saves them. Pretty easy to use.

On a Windows server or even a PC, you turn on the indexing and add on some search filters and then you can search the bodies of all the different common file types - very quickly too. The directories we use are per order or project so we also save any other files related to that project into the same directory (or a sub-directory under it). In Windows Explorer, you can use the search to find various files and also turn on the previewer to look at them. The Windows search has some fairly decent abilities if you learn how it works.

 

[Sparweb]

Lionel,
I use your second recommendation frequently.
Can you elaborate about your first recommendation: is this script custom-written?

STF

 

[geesamand]

People seem to forget about the fact the other guy you sent the email to has a copy of the email and will probably be keeping it for a century and you can't make them erase it. I fail to see the point in forcing the deletion at just one end. The lawyers will be at the other end.

This strategy is not about hiding possible evidence. In fact it's well agreed that in legal discovery, email is usually just sifting through immense stashes of garbage w.r.t. admissible evidence. Email is a huge part of the cost of defending yourself in court. The reason is to keep the stash of crap to a reasonable volume so that the plaintiffs can't use that as leverage to pry a settlement out of you.

I suppose if you or your company make nefarious decisions by email, you could have a second reason to purge your email.

 

[MacGruber22]

Jeez...I wouldn't trust a guy named "lionel Hutz" for much of anything!

"It is imperative Cunth doesn't get his hands on those codes."

 

[LionelHutz]

They're modifications, well really more a few tweaks, of scripts found on the internet. They're really not that complicated. I could post the scripts if you want either one.

The save one you just select the emails and run the script which brings up a window to select the location and then saves them.

The save all will save emails into a file structure on your disk that matches the inbox structure. You can select to only save a certain email folder or group of folders, but it still matches the file structure to the inbox structure. It would work perfectly for David if he wanted to dump everything onto a hard drive.

 

[MacGyverS2000]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HODjrjb32fU

Dan - Owner

http://www.Hi-TecDesigns.com

 

[geesamand]

At the end of this, here's what I did.

I chose a handful of topics that were of crucial importance to me. Basically a couple of product lines I was involved with and a couple of customers in which I had a number of email correspondences. Then I used search terms to pull emails from my past into those folders.

After this I found there was too much email in the archive area, so I sorted the new archives by size and went through the largest ones individually to delete ones I did not care about.

Warning: if you use Outlook, sometimes it copies emails and other times it moves them. If it's copying the emails, some of those emails can match more than one search and leave you with duplicates in your archive. It's not smart at all, and it doesn't warn you about when it's creating duplicates.

Warning 2: if you use Outlook, your Calendar counts against your storage use. My calendar was purged a couple of years ago and it's still 1GB in size. That's a bit frustrating, since I can't control the size/quantity of attachments to meeting invitations...

I wanted to save some stuff to PST to clear up my archive storage limits but PSTs are completely disabled.

 

[JedClampett]

If your company thinks that deleting Emails is going to lessen liability, they're going to be shocked. What would they rather have happen, be out front and turn over everything they have or be surprised about something incriminating from another source? Why don't we shred all documents after 10 years? It's a new world and we need to get used to it. Everything is saved somewhere.
We have a archive search function and I routinely turn up Emails that are from 1998.

 

[geesamand]

It's not about limiting the liability. All parties could have a copy of an important email. The facts are the facts.

This is really about the cost of the legal discovery process and keeping it contained enough that you can still defend yourself.

Even when you have a winning argument and evidence, the amount of documentation review that the process can mandate makes defending yourself prohibitively expensive. You must pay your lawyers to go through "everything" in preparation. If "everything" is sufficiently large, you can't afford to even begin a defense. I suspect too, that once the company finds itself settling, other lawsuits will become optimistic about their success.

I'm not legally trained so I hope I used the terms correctly.

 

[drawoh]

geesamand,

Now that your old emails are deleted and are no longer an apparent threat, what does your company do with its old backup tapes?

--
JHG

 

[geesamand]

I expect they discard them beyond that window of time. They might retain the backups for a few months after this "big purge" just in case someone made a major mistake. Would you like me to confirm?

 

[HamburgerHelper]

Limiting liability... I brought up an issue once with compliance. All my emails corresponding to a particular exchange as well as all of my other emails for the month of August just vanished once my complaint got to someone that understood what I was bringing up. I still don't know what to make of that other than more effort was put into trying to sweep up evidence than maintaining compliance.

 

[drawoh]

I just did a search on destroying backup tapes, and I found an interesting link.

NIST Special Publication 800-88 Guidelines for Media Sanitization.



--
JHG

 

[3DDave]

It seems so unlikely, with the advances in search and parsing, that there is a significant cost to going through emails.

See:

http://www.aid4mail.com/email-ediscovery

(consolidated list)

http://www.capterra.com/electronic-discovery-software/

With this in mind, it's more about hiding data than the cost of digging through it.

Also, an article written to law firms as a guide to the process:

http://www.americanbar.org/publicat...small-to-medium-cases-software-solutions.html

The reason that these tools exist is because sometimes defendants will dump TBs of data expecting to 'hide' information. That worked well with printed material, but not so much with electronic data.

One thing that is true is that (beyond the size where it is trivial) the size of the data doesn't affect the skill level to dig through it.

On the topic of where lawsuits affect companies, anyone else remember Blitz USA? Nothing to do with emails, but an example of being found liable. I haven't seen details about the evidence that would tell if the company had internal documentation that influenced the verdict or if it was entirely external actions.

 

[truckandbus]

My company has a 60 day rerention policy on inbox and sent box -no restrictions on user created folders

 

[drawoh]

3DDave,

The only way email would not be searchable would be if you encrypted everything, and were not going to be required to give up the key. I have done several searches through my email archives at home. On my Linux box, my emails are stored in mutt format, which is a plain text file for each email. With the Linux command line, I can search on dates. I can search on keywords. Within my email tool, I can search on sender and subject.

I don't know how Microsoft Outlook works. Even if the files are binary, either they are encrypted as noted above, or there is plain text embedded, and all I have to do is strip the binary stuff. I have written a very simple C[ ]program that does exactly that.

--
JHG

 

[3DDave]

The search software also looks for misspellings, and uses a Thesaurus for similar terms, et al. Much more than a straight text search. As the related pages indicate, there is also the problem of extracting attachments. They also make a traceable package of emails, which is the required deliverable.