Companies should be keeping business emails for at least six year. That’s the message from a new comment piece over at The Register. Unfortunately the same article draws attention to the fact only 1 in 4 businesses have an email retention policy designed to comply with industry regulations; leaving most open to legal problems in the future.

From the article:

“When two companies sue each other they have the right to ask for relevant documents from the other party in a process called discovery. When the documents are digital ones, such as emails or the contents of databases, the process is called e-discovery. “[Ian] Birdsey [of Pinsent Masons] said that companies that fail to store information for long enough can end up incurring significant costs in trying to recover backed-up files in order to comply with e-discovery obligations.”

Mimecraft research, highlighted in the same article, reveals most businesses don’t have adequate email back-up plans, with many businesses “not confident that they would be able to identify all emails relating to a specific customer in a timely manner”.

Email retention is important for all businesses, and with Simply Mail Solutions email archiving every message sent and received by a mailbox is stored for up to 10 years.