Email Retention Policy

[c1utch]

We're a local government agency that is subject to FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests.

Email retention normally circles around time, deleting emails after X amount of days/months/years. But some emails need to be retained based on content.

We're currently looking at upgrading our Email Archiver and there is an ability within this appliance to retain emails based on content. However, determining the content (or category) of an email will have to be determined by the end user through Outlook. As IT staff, we all know we can't get most end users to read a 3 sentence email with instructions let alone expect them to properly categorize their email for retention purposes.

So my question is, does anyone have any guidelines on Email Retention, or more specifically email deletion based on time line/category/etc?

Chris

 

[58sniper]

I can't recall how Email Archiver does it because it's been a while since I've used their stuff. But many archiving solutions do allow you to set different retention periods on individual folders within a mailbox. This may help.

If not, then your content monitoring solution may need to be replaced with something capable of categorizing at the server level.

Since I work in the email archiving space, I'm a big fan of having a blanket policy for the whole mailbox. Down the road, when you're doing an eDiscovery search, you may find that some mail that was deleted may have been in your best interest to keep.

Pat Richard MVP
Plan for performance, and capacity takes care of itself. Plan for capacity, and suffer poor performance.

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