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Email Retention
It is becoming increasingly necessary to retain and manage email archives. This is frequently driven by the need to comply with various
regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley,
SEC 17a-3/4,
NASD 3010 and
HIPAA.
But, in the long term, retaining email will be an important driver because of the inherent value of accessing past email and
the knowledge it contains.
But, when it comes to answering the fundamental question: "How long should you keep email around?" There is no one-size-fits-all policy.
Regulatory issues aside, some key issues to consider are:
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How bad is it if emails accidentally are deleted as a side effect of enforcement of the policy? Are there regulatory issues? Compliance issues? Other issues? Other costs? |
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Can your end users preserve critical email communications before they are automatically swept and deleted from your mail servers? |
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Does your business get frequently sued? Is email monitored on an ongoing basis for issues ranging from compliance violations to inappropriate behavior? |
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For a variety of reasons, there is no general consensus about how long you should retain your email (unless you are in a heavily
regulated industry where the retention periods are clearly defined). This should not be surprising. It simply points to the
complexity of matching business and legacy policy to the huge, unstructured and informal volume of email
communication we have today.
The ultimate question is, all things considered, in the case of the individual business, what system of retention yields the
highest ROI and/or least risk. Once you've exercised common sense about your
e-mail retention policy, you'll probably need to
talk to an expert to make sure you are managing your risk as effectively as possible.
Regardless of this decision, you should not delay in implementing a simple email archiving solution. It is critical to start
archiving now so you can keep your email in one central repository where you can easily and cost-effectively search it for
email discovery and other purposes. Once this is in
place, it's relatively easy to set retention periods across your user base.
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