Funded by the Foundation
Abstract
This project seeks to examine e-mail and the legal doctrines around it, to determine which approach to its retention is the sounder. More precisely it seeks to identify the legal and statutory obstacles which would prevent the adoption of an information management policy requiring the automatic and systematic deletion of all email messages, in all repositories, older than a predefined period.” The short answer to this question is a simple one: e-mail cannot be destroyed en mass after an arbitrarily assigned period in any case where a legal duty requires otherwise. The devil is, however, in the details: Legal duties arise from a great variety of sources, and the duties themselves vary quite considerably. Each such duty creates in the data object upon which it is imposed some sort of legal status — it is an evidentiary object, a regulatory compliance object, a government record, or whatever. The question then is what, if any, status does the law impose upon e-mail?