requirement to archive email. Anyone who has researched this question knows
that the answer depends on who you ask. Some lawyers say that not only
should we NOT archive email, they say that from a purely legal perspective
their advice is to force ALL email to be deleted from users' mailboxes as
quickly as possible. Of course, other lawyers say that we have to archive
email, but they invariably decline to specify a time period.
While I certainly don't have a definitive answer to this question, I have
learned something that has made a little more sense of the topic. When
talking to lawyers, the question most of us ask is "Do we have to archive
email?" This is NOT the right question to ask because the law doesn't care
about the medium, it cares about the content. From everything I can tell,
there is no legal requirement to archive email per se, but there may be a
requirement to archive the content of some email. Content is the key. While
this might seem obvious, failure to be clear about this can cause a lot of
confusion.
If your organization uses email to communicate content that legally needs to
be retained, then it is my understanding that such content does have to be
archived whether you do this by archiving the email itself, or documenting
and archiving the content in some other parallel information system.
Of course, it is absurd to try to create rules which only archive emails
with content that has to be retained. Therefore, the answer to the question
of "to archive email, or not to archive email" seems to depend on your
school's policy (both written and de facto) regarding how email is to be
used.
Perhaps we should just create two email addresses for every user, one for
communication of content which the law says has to be retained, and another
for content the law doesn't care about. Then all we have to do is teach
every user which email address to use for which type of content. Problem
solved, that was easy!
--
Tom Phelan
Director of Technology
Peddie School
tphelan@peddie.org
http://www.peddie.org
[ For info on ISED-L see https://www.gds.org/podium/default.aspx?t=128874 ]
Submissions to ISED-L are released under a creative commons, attribution, non-commercial, share-alike license.
RSS Feed, http://listserv.syr.edu/scripts/wa.exe?RSS&L=ISED-L
