Re: archiving email

[Zach Jansen <zjanse20 () CALVIN EDU>]

I am curious about this as well since I've been looking at this again recently. I looked at several school policies 
that are available via google: "site:.edu email retention policy"

In general what I saw were retention periods ranging from 180 days to 4 years. Public institutions had the longer 
periods as they sometimes had state public records retention requirements. Seemed like the private institutions favored 
the shorter retention periods. A few sites broke their email down into classifications such as administrative, fiscal, 
general, or ephemeral

The other part I was interested in was the mechanism for retention. In the cases I saw, the user is expected to 
manually implement the retention of the documents, usually by archiving documents, printing documents, or sending them 
to a retention email address. I didn't see any indication that schools were implementing systems to automatically 
retain all records for a period of time (I saw one or two schools that seemed to be automatically deleting anything not 
archived after the retention period) or based on other criteria such as keywords. To me it seems like relying on users 
to archive messages that may be relevant for litigation may be a weak spot in a retention plan. Once notice of legal 
action is received this seems easier to deal with, and I've seen a few response plans indicate the need to image/copy 
machines, email, etc when notice is received. Is the manual nature of retention a concern that others have with their 
email retention policies?

The other part I wondered about is, once a document is archived or printed, what is the retention period for those 
documents? I didn't see any indication of how that's being handled. I know that here, when people archive an email 
message, it's probably going to stay in the archive forever or until their storage is full. In my mind that would 
violate a records retention policy that states email should only be kept for X days or years when some of it is 
archived and kept for longer than the retention period.

Anyone have any advice on these issues?

Thanks,

Zach Jansen


-- 

Zach Jansen
Information Security Officer
Calvin College
Phone: 616.526.6776
Fax: 616.526.8550

> > > On 7/16/2009 at 10:29 AM, in message
<66CA77B6F1A6AE44B6EC941464FFB31C611A481C8E () EXCHCLUSTER scc stchas edu>,
Barbara Keim <bkeim () STCHAS EDU> wrote:
> We are developing a policy related to archiving college email including how 
> long to store the information in case it is needed in the future for a legal 
> discovery process.
>
> Could you please share samples of your policies including how long you are 
> saving emails.
>
> Thank you.
>
> Best regards,
>
>
> Barbara Keim, Ph.D.
> VP  Technology, Research, and Planning
> St. Charles Community College
> St. Peters, MO  63011
> 636-922-8573
>
>
> P Please consider the environment before printing this e-mail.