What's your company's email policy?

In a company I previously worked for, all emails were automatically deleted by the system after 90 days.

We outsourced our email maintenance to MicroSoft a few years ago. This allowed us to implement MicroSoft's 24 month retention policy on emails. Emails in any folder will be deleted after 24 months automatically. We received notice a few months before this was implemented so we had time to "clean up" our emails. If we want to keep any now, we need to stay on top of it and save it somewhere else.

I have worked with both of the above approaches, and like them. At a minimum, Pamela's approach is good for risk management as a "least restrictive" policy. Mark's is, from that perspective, a more optimal approach. Generally, emails are corp docs, and you should have a retention policy of some sort. "Retention" generally means "sort what you must keep, and purge the rest".

Additional limiter that I've worked with, and found both annoying and effective, is a data-max policy. Say 1 gig in your inbox. That sounds silly on the surface, but it incents the behavior that docs go through a doc process, and that you don't use your email system as your personal DMS, which is bad on a bunch of levels.

What I have found more effective in a broader scheme is training. Train people on how to manage their email, just as you should train them on how to use the phone, manage time, file paperwork, etc. Email management is simply a skill that needs to be developed, and we benefit from developing our employees.

Ping me if you need an email policy...I can dig up one that I did last year, but there are good templates out there, so I see it more as an implementation challenge (company appropriate standards, rules, and associated training).

Everywhere I've worked has set a size limit for the email server storage. A notice is automatically generated when it gets close to being full, then once it's full another notice is generated and at that time no emails can be received. And certain folders automatically delete after a set number of days (trash, junk, etc).

It is helpful to provide instructions for everyone on how to save the emails to other locations. An important email does not need to sit in the inbox, it can be saved to the client file or project file. You can have folders that are accessible through your inbox, but reside in a location other than the email server.

A previous employer deleted any email after only 6 months that was saved on the email server - this forced everyone to adopt new habits of saving the emails to other folders. It wasn't really a big deal, though. They held training and showed everyone how to set it up, gave notice for when the changes would be implemented, and sent out a few reminders before it happened.