‘You can’t delete my emails': IT employee informs coworkers he cannot retrieve old emails due to company's mail retention policy, they turn to upper management

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    "What do you mean, all my emails are gone?"
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    Yes, We Have A Mail Retention Policy Short
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    i get this same ticket about once a month, and i came in on the early shift this morning to 2 of them from 2 different people, both of whom should know better. for context, im a frontline helpdesk monkey for a university in the UK. we have a 2 year retention policy for emails. after 2 years the email is automatically deleted and cannot be recovered by any means. full stop. no wiggle room. the staff welcome packet includes this information. the IT help
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    page on our website states this information, the staff wiki states this information twice, in 2 different places. outlook itself, every time you log in has a yellow banner at the top reminding you of this. its not even a new policy. its been in place since at least 2014. how many different times, in how many different ways do we have to tell people? your emails WILL be deleted after 2 years and we CANNOT recover them after this.
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    and yet. 2 different members of staff, one of whom is a lecturer, submitted tickets this morning asking for help accessing old emails from 2020. i directed them to the wiki page that explains the retention policy and includes a guide on how to download and save important emails (our policy doesn't allow for in-place archives).
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    they were at least both polite about it when i informed them. in september i had the same ticket from a member of the finance department and he was absolutely incensed. he went on a tirade at me about information security, auditing and record keeping, then demanded to speak to my manager when i "refused" (because its literally impossible) to recover an important financial document he was keeping in an email from 5 years ago! (wtf? why would you store important documents in an email? why wouldnt
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    when my manager inevitable told him the same thing, he escalated to the department head, and then kept going. last i heard he submitted a formal complaint to the board of governors demanding that the policy be changed. (Edit: Ive just checked, and the policy doesnt apply to the departmental mailboxes for finance or HR. only to user's individual mailboxes.)
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    arwinda 21 hr. ago Two years is an awful short time for business emails. Some projects run longer than that, and suddenly related emails are gone. Also as others pointed out: in some countries you need to retain emails longer. Here in Germany it's 10 years for most of them. Not necessarily in the same mailbox, but having a copy somewhere also gives you the ability to extract it if someone needs to access it.
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    Seeing this request coming in multiple times is an indicator for you that something is wrong with your business processes. This should be raised to upper management, not just close the ticket and move on. Reply Share 145 elementz 17 hr. ago I'm working in Germany for a big German company, after 3 years a e-mail will be automatically deleted. This was introduced with the DSGVO. So I wonder how it even could be 10 Years. 26 Reply Share
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    plg94 22 hr. ago Tbh it's a sh y policy either way. I could understand it if the email trash folder was periodically deleted, but every mail in the inbox? Hell no, I'd complain too. Every free mail hoster since 2000 had infinite storage time and instead a size limit per account, and you may had to manually free up space if you got over the 100Mb/2G/whatever. But they never automatically delete any mail, so no wonder people are (not) used to it. 303 Reply Share
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    MeconiumMasterpiece 22 hr. ago Also depending on the location and field it might be mandatory to retain emails for a specific amount of time. 110 Reply Share Ghost Dan 17 hr. ago Courts also reallllly don't like it when you tell them no. "We don't have that [very recent, like 2021] email any more" will not go in your favor in court. 48 Reply Share
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    TheTeenage Oldman 21 hr. ago w f? why would you store important documents in an email? Used to have clients who would use the "Trash" like it was part of a filing system. Their hard drives would fill up slowing down their machine, we'd empty the trash to clear up space, and they'd go apes t. Reply Share 21
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    exterminuss 22 hr. ago in the Eu, more specific germany we have to archive all buisness related mails for 10 years by law Reply Share 31 Ankoku_Teion OP. 22 hr. ago that makes sense, and i'm sure the finance guy had a reasonable point about it. but i didn't set the policy and i can't do anything to change it, so berating me over the phone and complaining about me to my manager strikes me as somewhat unfair.
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    the board of governors set the policy, and if they thought his argument had merit i'm sure they would have changed the policy by now. 47 B Reply Share nFaculty 21 hr. ago While it is true that here in germany we need to archive business or finance related Mails, a simple outlook archive or exchange with 10 year retention isn't enough as it needs to be archieved without a way to change the mail afterwards.
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    good4y0u 22 hr. ago If you're a university and email storage is an issue you should probably just go to Google edu or Microsoft's offering. Google is roughly 30 GB /user which is enough for 7- 10 years storage at normal usage. This policy is archaic. Maybe limit the attachment size or the age for attachments over a certain size, but emails are not hard to store.
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    Some places have at least a 7 year audit window, and I'm sure you might have departments with those windows, such as financial, legal, or medical. I worked for a large university and even back in the early 2010's this was a policy that would have been considered archaic by 'modern' standards. 24 Reply Share
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    FunToBuildGames 23 hr. ago Please keep all my crop for infinite time on the slim chance that I haven't been paying attention and need one thing one day maybe. Also I need attachment size limits increased to 1GB so I can receive video emails of my cat from my home camera system thanks. Reply Share 45
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    Ankoku Teion OP. 23 hr. ago fu ing spot on. my last place was an MSP and one of our clients was a graphic design company. they were paying for each staff member to have extra space on onedrive, but the director demanded an increased attachment limit to 5gb so she could send 4k video to people, instead of just sharing the onedrive link. 22 Reply Share
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    FunToBuild Games 22 hr. ago Hey my email is really slow, can you fix it asap? Reply Share 13 Ankoku_Teion OP 22 hr. ago dont get me started. used to support an accountancy firm in scotland where every user would perpetually be a part of 8-16 shared mailboxes. we could never make them understand.... 8↓ Reply Share

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