On Fri, 16 Oct 2009, Tracy Reed wrote: > On Fri, Oct 16, 2009 at 05:00:09AM -0700, Pete Jansson spake thusly: > > This sounds like a good, cheap, fast answer, but I have worries when > > it comes time to respond to an e-discovery request to find a > > particular needle in that haystack. Those things can be > > If you want to invest some more time in the project and depending on > your coding skills you can pipe it all through Lucene via Solr. But in > my experience we have always had at least a few days to find such > things. Even just a plain dumb grep can cover many gigs of emails in a > few days.=20 > > > They should come up with the subjects and populations for saving all > > email, and then establish a default retention period for everything > > else. > > Definitely. I know of companies that specifically say DO NOT save > emails. Keep it for a week (or month or whatever) and then make darn > sure the email is gone. If you have a documented policy put into place > before the legal issues arrive that says "All emails are to be deleted > after a month" and you faithfully follow through on that policy it can > not only reduce the technical need to have to archive years of emails > but it can be legally safer since you have completely legally > destroyed any evidence that might be discovered.
the problem with this approach is that I have never heard of a company actually following it. pick a week or a month or whatever time period you want and you _will_ run into problems where you need to go back and refer to an older e-mail (a dispute with a vendor, proof that so-and-so said X, etc) every time I've seen someone try to do this sort of thing, what has really happened is that mail gets deleted from the servers on schedule, but eveyone keeps .pst files (with outlook) around with lots of stuff in them. if someone can show that this is the normal practice in the company, then all of those .pst files scattered across various places become e-discovery fodder (not to mention the problems that happen when something happens to a laptop and those .pst files are lost) David Lang _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
