What’s up with all these government people ignoring good email archiving protocol? It seems that several officials lately, who are presumably well educated and should know better, are coming out with their own brand of wisdom which says they should be allowed to delete emails after way too short a time.

ITWorld’s James Gaskin’s article, “E-mail archiving stupidity“, gets right to the point and pulls no punches. Gaskin reports that Dallas County officials want to delete email after 90 days, and asks, “have none of them heard of all the new regulations about e-mail archiving?” He also notes that the governor of Texas recently got the state’s Attorney General to issue a ruling that he could delete his own e-mails after one week. I think the governor needs to add a gallon or two to his ten-gallon hat, because the one he’s got on is obviously cutting off circulation to his brain. Delete e-mails after a week? Are you kidding me? Why on earth would anybody advocate such a thing, especially for a government official? This is sheer nonsense, and very probably against the law.

The email deletion policy has naturally got a lot of people down in the “Big D” concerned, and a recent article in the Dallas Morning News highlights some of the criticism. Presently, according to the article, Dallas County stores all of its email on computer tapes at an off-site warehouse, and complains that maintaining it is expensive and impractical, and the best way to save money is to automatically delete emails after 90 days. The Dallas officials are obviously a little behind the times. First of all, they are right to say that using computer tape storage is expensive and impractical. But here’s a news flash for these rocket scientists down there: There are alternatives to computer tape storage. Lots of them, which are cheaper and more efficient, and a whole lot easier to search and restore. Save your tape storage for use in migrating your oldest archives, but using it for recent storage is completely unnecessary, massively inefficient, and generally bad policy. 

The Dallas proposal also specifies that employees can save emails from the 90-day deletion by individually archiving them to meet state mandates for retention, but do you really want to put this much authority in the hands of thousands of individual employees? This needs to be governed by a uniform policy, and carried out on an automated basis, and not left to the discretion of individuals. The risk of the improper deletion of an email that should have been saved is just too great. Under such a policy, it’s only a matter of time before an email that is needed turns up missing, and then who is going to take the blame? Heads will roll, but it won’t be the mayor, the governor or the head of IT. It will be some poor, underpaid clerk in the records department, who was improperly trained to begin with, and had no idea that the email in question should have been retained.