US laws & archiving email

turnersloane

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Sep 27, 2006
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We're located in the state of Georgia, USA. I've been reading and attempting to comprehend both state and federal laws concerning archiving email. I need not mention "lawyer-speak". I realize that at some point I will need to spend a few dollars on our tech-savvy lawyer concerning this.

In the meantime, I thought that I would ask DA forum members for your experiences and/or input concerning email archiving, regardless of your location. Searches via the major the search engines always seem to lead back to "lawyer-speak" information without a definitive answer - which I ask:

Is my corporation required to archive all (incoming and outgoing) email to and from our servers? Obviously we maintain daily backups for all clients, but even so we cannot backup every single incoming and outgoing email without utilizing a massive amount of off-site space.

Can anyone point me in the right direction - or am I simply reading too much into US Federal regulations?


TIA,
Sloane
 
I'm not a lawyer, and I'm not a Georgian. And I've never played either on TV. When I last frequented Georgia was when I was a student at UofF and I and a friend had a cabin in the woods outside of Acworth (outside of Marietta, outside of Atlanta). The method in those days was to have a shotgun by the bed and another by the front door, and not worry what the local constables and JPs wanted. :D

That was a long time ago. The area is no longer rural (heck most of it seems to be part of Atlanta), and times are different.

So the following is based on my experience as a businessman in California with a datacenter in California. At my datacentre in the UK we follow the same rules, but maybe we should be doing something different. If I ever find out that's so I'll fight extradition, close the datacenter there, and stop sending my money to the UK. :)

As a service provider today in California (where I live) you're not even required to keep logs, no less emails (we keep one month worth of logs, generally the CentOS default unless you change it). You probably shouldn't keep emails, except in the normal course of backups, but I'd suggest you make sure your TOS tells your clients that you keep backups for your own convenience and that you're not responsible for their content. In the case of email that's important because you could never backup all their email as it came in. That's their job.

As a business you're not required to retain email for any length of time, but you need to be consistent and you must have a retention policy so if you get sued and get a discovery document you can reply with a copy of your policy, which can say you don't keep email. You better follow your policy, whatever it is, because once you provide it to the court it's a legal document, and if it's not being followed you could be guilty of perjury.

It probably wouldn't hurt if both your TOS and your Email Retention policy said that you don't keep your customer email; both of mine do.

Or you could get yourself an Exchange server and an off-the-shelf or custom mail archive solution and start an archiving service for your clients, and charge them a lot for it.

Since I'm not a lawyer I won't give you a copy of my Email Retention Policy; you're on your own there.

Jeff
 
Thanks, Jeff. Our TOS, does in fact, reflect the majority of your recommendations. I will run it by my lawyer to enure that we are up-to-date.

I think I was reading too many conspiracy theories concerning the Patriot Act...

As for Atlanta, it pretty must encompasses the northern half of the state, from Forsyth almost to Chattanooga. I don't think Acworth is even considered a suburb these days, but I recall when it seemed like it was in the boondocks. And everyone knows Marietta & the Big Chicken. That's where directions to the world begin. :)
 
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