Gmail or Thunderbird problem?

[Bart Silverstrim]

Mike McGinn wrote:

> We backup email, but we only retain the backups for a week or so before they 
> get overwritten. When you number you email accounts in the hundreds of 
> thousand retaining all that data becomes onerous and expensive. Some 
> customers retain email on the server and some do not. If you take your email 
> off our servers when you check it, it is a safe assumption that all trace of 
> it is gone within a week. It the government wants us to save all this crap 
> they are going to have to come up with some dough. All our servers are in 
> colocation facilities for redundancy of banwidth and power. it is not as if 
> we can have someone there all the time to play with tapes.

Depends on your country, no? I thought there were laws attempting 
passage that required XYZ time of data retention...I know public schools 
in the US are supposed to be archiving data, mandated by law, for a 
certain period of time, and corporations are being required to have the 
data and policies specifying their retention policy so that if email 
after...for example...three years is gone, you need the paperwork 
available saying it's policy being following and not a convenient oops 
that the CEO's messages to their underlings regarding missing financial 
information is in the bit bucket.

I'm not a lawyer, this is just info from news and what we're being 
ordered to do in the near future.

If you don't have the resources, well, that's your decision to risk in 
litigation I guess :-) Schools in the US are "mandated" all the time to 
spend money they don't have for the government (No Child Left Behind is 
largely hated in part because it's all *unfunded* mandates and programs.)