Managing Email Retention

The costs and dangers associated with keeping too much information, and the risks of not retaining the right information have already been covered in the Records Management strand of this resource. The same drivers apply equally to the retention of email and yet as a rule it is an area that if not ignored completely is usually handled inappropriately.

By What Criteria Should Email Retention Be Decided?

The only restraint usually placed on the retention of email is the imposition of pre-set storage quotas on individual user accounts. The intention of such limits is to prevent the unlimited accrual of email but adopting this approach does little to achieve this. When confronted with an 'inbox full' message most users will simply 'archive' a vast chunk of their messages and store them on their desktop as .pst files. In this scenario not only do the emails still remain, but they are now contained within an unmanaged and inaccessible local silo.

Alternatively users will often simply select those emails with the largest attachments that they have no immediate use for and delete those in order to reduce their account size back to a 'legitimate' level for a few days. Both of these represent retention management based either on file format or file size and neither pay due attention to the email's content: the property which should be the key determinant of its retention.

Retention Based On Content

It is one thing to state that email retention should be determined by its content, but quite another to enable this. Firstly it assumes that you have a retention schedule in place which defines the appropriate retention period for records of various types. Secondly it relies upon each user being able to quickly and easily make the right decision regarding the content of an email and how long it should be retained for - no easy task given the vast number they receive each day.

Separating The Wheat From The Chaff

The process of separating email records from email ephemera as outlined in the previous section has an important part to play in making this task more manageable. One way of doing this is to consider introducing an automatic deletion policy for all emails older than a certain amount of time (perhaps 90 days). After this time (by which any initial informational value is likely to have expired) the email is routinely removed from the user's inbox and permanently deleted. This relieves the user of the need to concern themselves with managing the ephemera - leaving them to concentrate on what they must do with the small proportion of emails which should be managed as records. This policy is not without risks, dependent as it is on the user to identify which emails are records and to categorise them according to their content to ensure their appropriate management. Being forced to choose what emails they must keep as opposed to which they should delete is a subtle, yet profound, change to the culture of email use and the role of the user within it and is not something to be introduced lightly or without due prior training and awareness raising.