How Long Should Government Retain Email?Xeni Jardin of Xeni Tech covered the problem of holding onto emails for NPR. Links and information at boingboing include:
...policies are
all over the map, there's no consistency, and government watchdogs
believe more frequent purging means the public loses access to valuable
historic information. Washington, D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty recently ordered
that all e-mails not flagged as "save" by city government workers will
be deleted and purged from the city's email system in January of 2008.
After that initial purge, all city employee email older than 6 months
which is not specifically flagged as "save" will be auto-deleted.
The more e-mail government employees send, the more there is to store,
costing taxpayers money. But costs must be balanced against the need to
preserve history, and ensure government transparency. If individual
officials decide which emails to save and which to delete, will they
choose to save potentially incriminating or embarassing emails? Both IT budgets and public knowledge make demands, so what's a person with a growing email archive to do? On an older machine at home I had a corrupt email archive that I suspect had become too big for the most popular mail client. I've resolved never to let that happen again. In that case, Thunderbird email client saved me, and imported the corrupt gigantic archive without losing the folders that spared me from horrendous searches in that dark pool of old email.
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