Email retention policy: What is it, and how do you draft one?

Emails have long been standardized as the formal mode of communication. Despite the evolution of varying mediums of communication, email has stood the test of time and continues to be the most trusted and secure form of business communication. With the rising dependence on emails, they've grown from being just a form of information exchange to a form of documentation that serves several business needs and acts as legal evidence. So it's crucial for organizations to adopt an email retention policy to retain their employees' emails in the right way, for the right duration.

In this article, we'll walk through the basics of email retention policies, the need for email retention, the factors to be considered while drafting the policy, and how an email administrator can go about creating a retention policy.

What is email retention?

Email retention refers to the practice of storing an organization's emails for a certain duration based on compliance, legal, regulatory, and business requirements. By following email retention, the organization follows a mandatory retention period for the emails either in the employees' mailboxes or in an email archiving solution.

What is an email retention policy?

An email retention policy is the procedure that outlines the conditions and the duration set for the organization's emails to be retained before they can be deleted from the system. The email administrator can define the retention policy based on the employees’ profiles, the kind of emails they share, and the mandatory retention duration defined for the geography or the industry the organization is a part of. Based on these conditions, multiple retention policies can be drafted for different sets of users.

Importance of retaining emails

Every organization needs to have a well-drafted email retention policy to archive their emails safely for several reasons, including compliance, legal coverage, and data protection. Let's take a look at some of the most important reasons why emails need to be retained.

Protection from data breaches

Email has been the most sought-after cyberattack target for a while now. But with an organization's most important information, such as contracts, proposals, intellectual property, and all other data residing in emails, it's vital to protect emails and have a secure archive. An email retention solution provides a safe archive for all of your important emails, and it can come to your rescue even when your employees are locked out of their email accounts or data is lost due to a data breach.

Compliance with regulatory standards

Data protection laws are on the rise around the globe. In addition to regional laws, many industry-specific regulations are being imposed. This creates the need for different types of data to be retained for different periods. With a retention policy in place, managing the requirements imposed by each regulation becomes simpler, and businesses wouldn't have to face issues caused by non-compliance with mandatory laws. Simply by defining the retention period for different data types, they can rest assured that important emails are securely retained for compliance.

Protection from legal risks

Any organization is susceptible to legal issues that could arise due to external stakeholders, other companies, or sometimes even their own employees. Without producible evidence, the legal proceeding can become a huge hassle for the company. Having legally admissible proof in the form of emails can help make a valid case for the organization, save it a lot of money, and prevent reputation loss amongst customers.

Improved data management

On average, a midsize organization exchanges at least 40,000 emails per day. This number is a clear indication of the amount of email data that organizations deal with. While the importance of some of these emails is short-lived, a lot of important data is preserved in them, and they need to be retained for long-term use. However, preserving all of these emails in your email provider is only going to add more load to your server and cause slowness and disorganization.

To avoid these scenarios, it's better to archive the older, important emails in a separate location, leaving just the recent emails in users' mailboxes. This also ensures that your users don't run out of much-needed storage space on your email provider.

Streamlined eDiscovery process

eDiscovery requirements come in many forms. You may have to prove adherence to data protection laws during an audit. Certain emails may be requested in court as part of a legal proceeding your organization is caught up in. Or an employee may have breached their contract, and you'll need an email to conduct an investigation. But with the barrage of emails that organizations handle on a regular basis, finding these elusive emails can be a laborious and time-consuming process.

Using advanced search capabilities, most email retention solutions come equipped with an eDiscovery tool that helps locate only the required emails in a matter of minutes.

Check out the detailed benefits of email archiving in this article.

Considerations while creating a retention policy

Multiple factors need to be kept in mind before drafting a retention policy for your organization. Let's take a look at some of them in this section.

Compliance requirements

One of the preliminary considerations must be regarding the compliance laws your organization falls under. Identify the compliance laws that are mandatory for your organization based on the sector and the region you're a part of. Once you have a fair idea of which laws are mandatory, the minimum retention period and the data types necessary for each law should be considered for retention.

Some of the most common compliance laws and their respective retention periods have been tabulated below.

Duration

While it's important to consider mandated compliance and data protection laws, you'll also have to keep in mind your business’s requirements. If you look for older emails frequently, the retention policy needs to be created based on that duration. Identify the emails that are commonly needed, such as invoices, contracts, or reports, and consider if the retention duration for these emails needs to be longer than the number of years mandated by the compliance laws.

Data type

Email data handled by an organization can be broadly classified into legal emails, customer support emails, emails containing employee data, financial emails, and operational emails. Based on how often the data is needed, you can decide whether the email needs to be retained or deleted. Among the emails that need to be retained, the conditions and duration can be defined by ranking each data type’s importance.

Employee type

Enterprise organizations employ thousands of employees. Not all of them send emails that are equally important or liable. If every single email is retained, this could lead to severe storage and server load issues. So it would be prudent if admins assessed the email senders and defined the retention policy by taking their importance into consideration. For example, emails sent by C-suite members, finance teams, and legal teams hold a higher value compared to other employees, and the retention policy should be drafted taking this into account.

How to create an email retention policy

An email retention policy needs to be clearly thought out and executed in a step-by-step manner by involving all of the departments in the organization. The following steps can serve as a benchmark for all organizations.

1. Classify the stakeholders and departments

Identify the key members who'll be working on drafting and reviewing the policy. The team that will create the retention policy should include representatives from the relevant departments to ensure that all of the stakeholders’ requirements are taken into consideration. The retention durations that are mandatory according to compliance laws should be determined by a lead. Each representative should work on creating a policy for their department, with input from the lead about the base guidelines that should be taken into account.

2. Identify compliance requirements

The next step would be to identify the regulatory bodies and laws that the organization needs to comply with. Depending on the region the business is headquartered in, certain industrial laws might apply. The business also needs to comply with sector-specific laws that apply to them. Based on the mandate by relevant regulations, the organization should decide which emails need to be retained and for how long. This decision needs to be made by a central team member and then applied by all of the department heads.

3. Segment the email data types

Identify the different types of emails transacted in your organization and classify them. The broad categories could be customer emails, legal emails, finance/revenue-related emails, marketing/design emails, and report emails. Each department rep can decide the retention duration for emails that are relevant to them. In general, business-critical emails need to be kept for the maximum period. Legal emails containing contracts or reports need to be retained for as long as required by law, and emails containing customer data should be kept only as long as the data is required.

4. Define the duration

Deciding the retention duration for emails is one of the vital parts of drafting an email retention policy. While the regulatory laws that your business needs to abide by provide an adequate understanding of the retention duration, the specific needs of your organization need to be considered as well. Based on the department and the correspondence type, you can decide on the retention period of the emails that are critical for your business and apply the same in your policy.

5. Draft retention policies

With these considerations in mind, draft an email retention policy document. In the document, clearly define the types of emails to be retained along with the relevant durations. Most email archiving solutions provide the option to create custom retention policies for different departments or sets of people. Using this feature, formulate separate custom policies based on the departments’ importance. Separate policies can be created for members of the C-suite because their exchanges are likely to contain more important data.

6. Review policies with department heads

With the policy document drafted, a copy of its specifications should be sent to all department heads for their approval. This process could go back and forth depending on whether the heads have any reservations with their policies. They may want to reduce or increase retention periods, or include retention periods for certain types of emails that have been left out of the document. Once all of the queries and feedback have been addressed, a final document should be drafted and approved by all of the involved members.

7. Enforce the policy and educate employees

Now that the policy is finalized, it should be created in the email archiving solution. Based on that solution, you can create multiple policies, define the conditions for email retention, the employees to whom the policy should be applied, and set the duration. Repeat this process for every policy that you create by altering the conditions accordingly. Once you’re done, inform your employees about the policy in place and provide a set of email guidelines for them to abide by.

8. Review audits and iterate regularly

An email retention policy can be deemed successful only if the policy is regularly reviewed and alterations are made as required. Appoint members in your organization to check the audit logs in your archiving solution. If you find that the policy can be improved, make alterations to accommodate them. In case there are certain types of emails that are never looked up, you could coordinate with the department head and choose to decrease the retention duration for these emails. This would help with managing your archival storage better.

Wrapping up

With email volumes increasing, email retention has become an inevitable need for businesses. Following a structured approach to creating an email retention policy for your organization can help alleviate legal, compliance, and other business risks. It also helps in efficient storage and data management. To implement an effective email retention policy for your business, adopt a stable and secure email archiving solution that can help you automate this process. With the right policy in place, continuous reviews and modifications will help your retention policy stay relevant.

eProtect is a cloud-based email archiving and security solution that provides email archiving for cloud and on-premise email providers. The solution offers secure email archiving, quick eDiscovery, and data export to ensure organizations stay compliant and are prepared for all legal enquiries. eProtect is the archiving solution powering Zoho Mail, a platform trusted by millions of users.