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How Long Should You Keep an Email?

I don't like to delete emails. It's true, I'm the guy that can find something that was sent to me long before Britney Spears married Kevin Federline.

This means that my inbox is loaded with tens of thousands of emails, some of which are from as far back as 2004.

This prompted the topic to come up recently at our weekly office meeting. How long should you keep an email? A week? A month? A year? Forever?! What if you delete it and then you need it again for legal purposes? Once it's gone, it's gone forever.

The discussion quickly escalated to what type of policy a company should have regarding saving emails. Up to this point, CWS has had a loose policy that we keep a copy of all email communication with customers, but delete all those emails from your brother-in-law. You know, the ones that you shouldn't be getting at work in the first place.

But if your company policy is to keep a copy of every email, how do you monitor whether this is actually being done and support mailboxes that become very very large? This brought up an interesting discussion... Does your company have a policy on deleting or saving emails? If so, what is it and how is it enforced?