In the two years now that I've been reporting on how people deal with emails, it still astonishes me that there is still so much bad practice and confusion. Most offices fail at even at the most basic level of filing important emails in a place that other members the team can access and search them. Archiving them as records for potential e-discovery and subsequent legal hold seems to be beyond some of even the most records-aware companies. Then we have the two extremist camps - "delete everything after a given period" and "keep everything in case it's useful oneday." Our recent E-Discovery and ERM survey shows that 26% have undiscriminating policies on deletion of all emails, 23% keep everything just in case and 31% have no policies or non-enforced policies. The remainder, quite rightly, either manually or automatically declare important emails as records and delete the others.
Personally, I blame both Microsoft and Google for not leading people in an appropriate direction - well, Microsoft mostly for not having a joined-up answer for linking Exchange and SharePoint, but Google have made their "keep everything and we will find it" statement that will fill the world with data farms of spinning disks full of ancient emails. There's another question in the report about what people consider to be their repository of record for emails, but it makes such depressing reading, I'm just going to give you the graph.
