Nobody likes email retention, especially me. Believe me. No … really. Why on earth would I ask you, a productive researcher with no time for chit-chat, much less time to police your email, to spend time looking at your email, pondering it, and (hopefully) deleting a bunch of it? No sane person would do that.
As it turns out, email retention, while it can be painful, is actually a good thing, for you and for the agency. There are two main risk-related reasons to implement email retention.
Risk Reduction
First, email retention policies, “…are driven by the risk of TPIA requests, litigation subpoenas, and discovery requests, along with the requirement to eliminate transitory information and to properly maintain other state records,” says TAMUS General Counsel Brooks Moore, who is our System expert on this topic. “An automatic delete policy is a best practice,” he states. Furthermore, researchers that are reticent to implement email retention, “have [probably] not been involved in the voluminous email and document production from a number of TTI open records requests and discovery requests/subpoenas (guardrail litigation, etc.). In my experience, once a researcher has experienced this, they become an advocate for automatic delete policies.”
“An automatic delete policy is a best practice.”
Brooks Moore, TAMUS General Counsel
Retention Compliance
Second, retention of important information, i.e., state records, should not be maintained in email, “but should be retained in approved systems for electronic files and state records. An automatic delete policy encourages compliance with these requirements by forcing employees to properly file emails outside of email for continued preservation.” What are those approved systems? For TTI, OneDrive, mainly. On the flip-side of this argument, most emails are NOT considered state records, but transitory information. Transitory information should NOT be kept as it is not subject to records retention. Keeping it incurs risk as noted above.
Reducing risk and increasing retention compliance are a one-two punch that helps keep us safe and secure.