Email Backlog? Think Twice Before Hitting Delete

By Gail Bisbee, President/CEO, Confidential Records Management, Inc.

For Immediate Release   -   February 05, 2010

Have you ever been over the limit for email capacity at work, or you were tired of sifting through a packed inbox, so you deleted all your emails from the past few months or even from the past year?  You may have scanned through them and figured since you hadn’t looked at them in the past few months, you wouldn’t miss them when they were gone.  “Delete all” may seem like the best option, but, that might end up being a costly mistake. By law, you may be required to keep certain email messages.

Because email is such a common and important way of communicating, legal regulations have been enacted that treat an email message just like any other record.  This means if you are audited, you may be asked to provide a backlog of emails.  It also means that courts consider email messages as evidence.  Judges are now ruling that businesses that fail to maintain and produce email records may be hiding key evidence or willfully destroying evidence.

So what do you do?   You can’t possibly keep every email, so here are some tips on how to protect you and your business through better email retention and management:

• Messages to keep – This will depend on your business and industry.  However, consider keeping emails that reflect the position of your business, complete a transaction, are part of an official record or agendas and minutes from meetings.  These rules apply to emails you’ve created as well as received.  Keep in mind that when capturing an email exchange, all the responses are retained.  Be sure to consult your legal and accounting staff to determine exactly what should be kept for your situation. 


• Retention period of emails – Keeping everything for years and years, just to be safe, doesn’t work when it comes to records, including emails.  Federal law says that during an audit, all records on hand can be looked through, so developing a retention schedule is key.  Since emails are like any other record, they too will have a specific retention period based upon the information contained in the email. To develop a retention schedule, talk with your legal staff to be sure you aren’t deleting emails too soon or too late.


• Don’t forget to back up emails – Most records have multiple copies stored, so in case something happens to the original, the file can still be accessed in another way.  We all know computers and servers can fail so, when you’re planning how to retain email messages, you need to determine what you would do if your computer or server crashed.  When planning email retention, speak with a professional records management center as many have programs available that are specifically designed to identify, retrieve, share and retain emails for as long as needed.


• Protect you and your company – It’s important that once you have decided what types of emails you or your company should be keeping, make sure to take time to develop email retention and management policies.  You want to make sure that all personnel understand the policies.  The last thing you want to find out is that an employee did an email purge before making sure important emails were first saved.

Getting started with email management and retention may sound overwhelming, but this is one project you don’t want to procrastinate on. Most businesses owners would agree that anything that puts their company at risk during an audit or litigation needs to be addressed immediately.  In creating a plan that will work best for your company make sure you are consulting with professionals, such as your legal and accounting staff as well as records management center.