Re: [SAGE] Mailbox retention settings

[Brad Knowles <brad@shub-internet.org>]

At 10:12 AM -0500 1/4/07, Bennett wrote:

>  Just curious about how everyone has handled the topic of email retention?
>  My Director and I feel that our new legal department is trying to be a
>  bit over-restrictive and want to see how others have dealt with this.

I believe that some useful general advice on this topic can also be 
found in booklet #15 in the SAGE Short Topics series, which is 
available for free download to all SAGE members.  See 
<http://www.sage.org/pubs/15_postmaster/15_postmaster.html> for more 
information.

Caveat: my name appears as one of the co-authors of this booklet, so 
I may be a bit biased.  ;)

>  * How long is your retention period?
>
>  * If your retention policy is new, how did your users react/handle the
>  new restrictions?
>
>  * What impact, if any, did you see on your file storage after activating
>  the retention policy?
>
>  * What impact, if any, did you see in the number of requests for messages
>  to be restored from backup?
>
>  * What tools did you use to assist in the process?

There's a lot of background here that we don't have.  For example, 
are you impacted by SarbOx regulations?  Are you a financial services 
industry which is required to keep a copy of all communications 
(including e-mail and IMs) to and from customers for seven years? 
Are there other regulations that might be applicable (e.g., the UK 
RIP laws)?

Also, what kind of customer model are you assuming?  Do you want 
information from ISPs?  I can give you data for what we did at AOL, 
and what we did at Belgacom Skynet, but I don't know if that's useful 
to you.  What is your storage model?  Do your clients do mostly 
off-line storage (e.g., a POP3 model), or do they do mostly online 
storage (e.g., an IMAP model)?

There's lots of other questions which follow on from there.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad@shub-internet.org>

Trend Micro has announced that they will cancel the stop.mail-abuse.org
mail forwarding service as of 15 November 2006.  If you have an old
e-mail account for me at this domain, please make sure you correct that
with the current address.