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Enron Mail |
Please familiarize yourself with GE's Mail retention Policy. It is
substantially different from what we are used to. --D GE's Mail Retention Policy E-mail is a tremendous productivity tool, but its volume and use carry with it a number of issues. Keeping up with the volume of e-mail is burdensome, indeed often stressful. The unnecessary retention of e-mail uses valuable IT resources, and the volume of unnecessary e-mail slows down our ability to process and find the materials we really need. Importantly, recent court cases illustrate how e-mails, which are so useful because of their informality and speed, can become the subject of intense scrutiny over meanings the authors may never have intended. Words and phrases intended to be ironic, sarcastic or amusing can be taken out of context with embarrassing - and unintentionally harmful - consequences. (1) Proper document retention is one important way to control these burdens and risks. Our company policy has been to discard unneeded e-mail after 30 days. To implement this policy, we are, beginning September 1, 1999, instituting automatic deletion of e-mail in primary e-mail folders (Inbox, Outbox, Sent Items, Drafts) company-wide after 30 days. In addition, e-mails stored in other folders will be deleted after 365 days. Finally, you should save e-mails on your local hard-drive only where it is essential (the auto-delete will not operate on the local hard drive). These automatic deletion procedures will be subject to legal limits on document destruction, limits that apply to e-mails. When an employee's e-mail is potentially relevant to litigation or threatened litigation, counsel for your business will cause the automatic suspend feature to be disabled for an appropriate time period. A second limitation involves retention of certain records required by law in such areas as tax, EHS, government contracts. Such limitations will be implemented on a business-by-business basis and in corporate components. Accordingly, for employees in the businesses, your General Counsel and Messaging Leader will be in touch with you about implementation of the auto delete feature in the next week or so. For corporate employees, Brackett Denniston and David Etue will provide further guidance shortly. (2) But proper document retention practices represent only part of the answer to minimizing the risk that e-mails will be misunderstood or used improperly by our adversaries. The best solution, of course, is to ensure that we compose our e-mail carefully and sensibly, just as we would any other written communication. In that regard, we are attaching a list of tips and best practices. Following these suggestions and practices will improve the clarity of our communications and address their volume as well. We believe that we can improve the use and productivity by taking the time to write e-mail intelligently, and by retaining only those e-mails required by law. Thanks for your help.
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