Archived email

I am a firm believer in it. Some companies have a rule to delete email older than a set date. I used to work for one of these and I am sending them the link to this article.

Morgan Stanley case highlights e-mail perils
The $1.45 billion judgement against Morgan Stanley for deceiving billionaire Ronald Perelman over a business deal has a lesson all companies should learn -- keeping e-mails is now a must, experts say.

Banks and broker-dealers are obliged to retain e-mail and instant messaging documents for three years under U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission rules. But similar requirements will apply to all public companies from July 2006 under the Sarbanes-Oxley corporate reform measures.

At the same time, U.S. courts are imposing increasingly harsh punishments on corporations that fail to comply with orders to produce e-mail documents, the experts said.

Where judges once were more likely to accept that incompetence or computer problems might be to blame, they are now apt to rule that noncompliance is an indication a company has something to hide.

It is always good to save these. Most email programs allow you to export email into a separate file so you can archive by year and burn them onto two or three CD-ROM disks (in case one goes bad -- also store them in different locations in case of fire) This has saved my butt more than one time.