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E-mail:
Delete It or Keep It?
If you delete
it, you might be breaking the law
KANSAS CITY, Mo., Nov. 18, 2003:- Is your company breaking the
law with its e-mail retention policy? Regardless of whether
you do business in the United States or anywhere else in the
world, when you delete e-mails you may very well be breaking
the law.
Regulations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in the United
States specify retention periods for certain business
communications, including e-mail. Similarly, most if not all
civil law countries -- such as Mexico and Puerto Rico, and a
large portion of the world -- require organizations to save
all business correspondence, which again includes e-mail, for
a specific period of years. In Mexico, for example, the
retention period is 10 years.
Is the answer to never delete e-mail? Not according to the
recent study Legal Obstacles in E-mail Message Destruction --
conducted by John C. Montana, J.D., and funded by the ARMA
International Educational Foundation. As the study showed,
there are no simple solutions to this dilemma, which is facing
governments and corporations of all sizes, especially large
multinationals.
Managing e-mail to exploit its usefulness while minimizing its
risk is one of the most difficult information management
challenges facing organizations of all types and sizes around
the world. This study specifically examined the legal
doctrines around e-mail to determine the best approach to its
management.
The results of the study were announced at the 2003 ARMA
International Annual Conference and Expo in Boston, October
18. A free copy of the report detailing the study's findings
is available at
www.armaedfoundation.org .
ARMA International Educational Foundation is a
nonprofit research and educational organization founded in
1997 by ARMA International, a not-for- profit association for
records and information management professionals. The
foundation funds research projects such as this and other
educational opportunities to further promote and develop
records and information management. |
