Actually e-mail should be managed to it’s content. E-mail is ONLY a vehicle for transmitting information. As a broad example, if your retention policy for HR documents is 10 years, then e-mail regarding HR issues needs to be kept for 10 years. If your retention policy for facilities documents is 3 years, then e-mail regarding facilites needs to be kept for 3 years.

Again, it’s about managing the content of the information, not the media it’s delivered on.

KEEPING e-mail longer than your retention policy can also get the company in trouble. Having 10 years of e-mail means that all 10 years have to be disclosed during the discovery phase of legal proceedings, and there can be lots of stuff in 10 years of e-mail that allows the other side to build a case against your company.

As an example, let’s say that budget time rolls around, and the facility engineer recommends replacing an older fire supression system. Budgets are tight, and the manager responds in e-mail, “not this year, next year”. Next year rolls around, and the same thing happens. Having BOTH e-mails from the manager telling the facility engineer “not this year…” could be grounds for negligence in the event that the fire supression system fails, causing damage or injury.

Another example is “jokes” in e-mail. If your company institutes a policy against jokes in e-mail, but you have 10 years of e-mail, someone could find “joke e-mails” from 10 years ago as support in a sexual harassment or discrimination suit. The company would have to go back and document its policies at the time the e-mail was sent, and even if there was no policy against joke e-mails at the time, it helps establish tha the company culture tolerates (x or y) sort of behavior.

As the article mentions, once the company is notified of legal action, ALL LEGAL EVIDENCE SHOULD BE PRESERVED IMMEDIATELY. If your IT folks are not trained in “chain of custody” procedures, have the lawyers bring in an outside IT firm that specializes in forensics and legal discovery procedures. Having an outside company perform the discovery looks better, because there is no opportunity for coersion or bias based on friendships or reporting structure within the company.

In order to accomodate the revised FRCP rules, and to facilitate eDiscovery, many companies are implementing e-mail archiving solutions that automatically story a copy of e-mail on a separate server. Many so-called “archiving” solutions just capture internet e-mail — just the messages between your company and your customers or vendors (or your Aunt Betsy if you use corporate e-mail for personal use), but do NOT capture internal e-mails, such as the ones between you and your manager or subordinates. If you implement an automated e-mail archive solution, make sure it captures everything.