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Comment by eblume | Hacker News Reader

A lot of companies (or at least several I've worked with) have policies that emails must not be kept for more than one or two months. I gather in-house exchange servers helps to enforce that.

I was told that this is because such a policy allows the company to respond to subpoena requests by simply saying "our policy is to discard all emails after two months, so we cannot comply with this request."

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Is that valid if employees keep their own backups, and the subpoenaed emails do still exist?

Yes. The subpoena is not for every person that may have a copy of the e-mail, ever. It's for a piece of evidence that that specific entity may have.

Wouldn't that back fire on the company (A) if some other company (B) were to use it to their advantage? e.g. B don't pay an invoice, delay 2 months, then demand proof from A that they sent the invoice? Or a disgruntled employee could claim that they informed management months ago about a problem, and management ignored the problem. Sounds like more trouble than it's worth.

Where I've worked, invoicing gets sent to another system that does retain data (I think forever).

In my experience, most companies have a data retention policy that explicitly states that old emails must be kept for a number of years. A separate storage of email archives is an option, but it must not be difficult to extract an email from the archive - which is why I think keeping it in the original inbox is a better option.

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