Email is a vital part of almost every business today. It is challenging for businesses to keep their email protected from spam and spoofing and working in a timely fashion. They must be stored and retaining them as required by various laws is also required and can be quite challenging.
Here is a handy chart of the various regulatory bodies record retention periods. It could be from a year to 35 years depending on your industry.
| Regulations | Industry | Years Retention Required |
| FDIC | Banking | 5 years |
| FCC / Title 47, Part 2 | Telecommunication | 2 years |
| FDA / Title 21, Part 11 | Pharmaceuticals, Biological Products & Food manufacturers | 5 to 35 years |
| HIPAA | Healthcare | 7 years |
| DOD 5015.2 | DOD Contractors | 3 years |
| SEC 17a(3) and 17a(4) | Securities Firms, Investment Bankers, Brokers & Dealers, Insurance Agents | 7 years to lifetime |
| SEC 204-2 | Investment Advisors | 7 years to lifetime |
| Sarbanes Oxley (SOX) | public companies | 7 years |
| IRS | companies | 7 years |
| PCI DSS | Credit card & cc processing companies | 1 year |
| FOIA (Federal and State) | All Federal, state & local government agencies | 3 years |
| Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act | Banking & Finance Firms | 7 years |
Now for the hard part. How do you retain your emails?
There are a plethora of available methods to retaining your email. From using your email client to save, archive, and backup your emails to buying servers and mass storage devices to run open source or purchased programs or using cloud based services which perform this function. Some larger organizations have full-time staffers who manage only their email retention.
Many use the Microsoft Outlook client on their computers. Here are instructions Microsoft provides to export and backup your emails, contacts, and calendar from Outlook to an Outlook ‘.pst’ file. Included are instructions to configure Outlook’s automated archiving feature which makes part of this needed function automatic and while emails are archived, they can be retrieved with an email search from the client! A separate strategy to make the .pst files and retaining them will also be needed. If you use Microsoft Exchange, they have a cloud based service and offer a free trial to get more familiar.
Do you need our help to handle your email retention and internet presence?
We work with our clients to provide the type of email service they need and would be happy to discuss this as part of the internet presence management services we provide. We will be happy to work with you to manage you website/s, storefront/s, blog/s, email, SEO, SEM, social and other internet marketing efforts.
note: We are not associated with and are not recommending any of the companies or services mentioned here. They are simply examples of what is available in the market place.