Electronic mail (e-mail) has evolved as a universal service that largely supports a communication mechanism that is essentially critical both internally within your business community and externally to customers, including prospects, and the general public. . Any email retention policy seeks to establish a default retention period for email held on your company’s live server. It also confirms roles and responsibilities for implementation, including litigation hold management.

The 2006 amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure addressing the discovery of electronically stored information require companies to establish email retention policies. The scope of said policy must take into account:

· all email systems provided by your company;

all users and email account holders of your company; Y

· all email and instant messages sent or received through your company’s email systems.

There are email archiving solutions that may be helpful in helping you ensure that your emails are preserved in accordance with the Amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. The first and most important measure you can implement that can help keep your email records compliant is to have an Email Retention Policy.

A good email retention policy should address transient email and IM records that are created primarily for routine communication or information exchange. Messages are considered transitory messages (eg, meeting notices, internal requests for information, announcements, etc.) when they have no lasting value and can indeed be quickly deleted; or read and retained on the active server no longer than the default retention period.

Furthermore, a well-intentioned email retention policy should also determine the nature of messages of lasting value. When the content of an email or instant message constitutes one or more of the following characteristics, that is:

operating value as required by your business;

· legal or probative value as required by law;

· historical significance; Y

· of critical life value to ensure business continuity;

should be classified as having lasting value. All email and instant messages that have lasting value should be moved to dedicated storage on your company’s network file systems (the equivalent of an electronic filing cabinet) with pre-allocated retention periods.

You may have a default retention period set by your business email system that can be set to automatically delete messages in accordance with existing legal guidelines. This automatic deletion policy applies to messages within all folders (inbox folders, set archive folders, draft archive folders, etc.) stored on your active email server.

You must also have the need for a backup file system in place. These backups are for system restore and disaster recovery purposes and are not designed to facilitate the recovery of deleted messages.

Conversely, however, when a litigation retention policy is in place, that policy overrides any Email Retention Policy as well as any records retention schedule that might otherwise have required the transfer, deletion, or destruction of documents. relevant until the hold has been resolved. .

Therefore, you can create an effective email retention policy by:

· take the first step in creating a real retention policy;

· create strict guidelines for managing removals;

establish retention periods based on existing legal guidelines;

be consistent with applicable email retention rules at all levels of your business;

make sure everyone knows your retention rules; Y

· ensure that your Email Retention Policy is followed.

When you have a well-developed and properly implemented email retention policy, it ensures your business’s ability to handle regulatory and electronic discovery requests.