Should government workers be deleting their email?

Governing.com says few governments have a system for managing their e-mail, putting their agencies at legal risk:

Millions of state and local employees in jurisdictions all over the country correspond by e-mail every day without giving much thought to what should happen to the product. They may come to regret that behavior. Not only are records, and history, being lost, but many government lawsuits now turn on what is buried in old e-mail messages. Government policy simply has not kept up with the evolving technology. "At the moment," according to Charles Davis, of the National Freedom of Information Coalition, "everyone is looking up and saying, 'Maybe we ought to be keeping this stuff.'" But few have come up with clear rules governing where and how to keep it.

Kentucky's Department for Libraries and Archives does offer guidelines on retaining state government email. These include "Guidelines for Managing E-mail in Kentucky Government" (PDF) and the "Decision Sequence for Determining E-mail Retention." (PDF) And if you wonder how Kentucky's email systems operate,  there's the Commonwealth Office of Technology's explanation of state email systems.

The Indiana Commission on Public Records offers guidelines (PDF) to Indiana agencies.

The Governing.com article describes a few of the ways government officials skirt the public record laws, including "pinning," which "allows two people to send messages back and forth directly to each other's PDAs, without going through the government computer network."

The article says the legal system is beginning to force governments to come to grips with the problem:

... if there was any doubt about the importance of public e-mail management, it should have disappeared in December 2006, with a change in the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. Under those rules, state and local governments that become litigants in a federal case will have to produce any electronic information considered relevant to the case. If they can't easily retrieve e-mails because they haven't established an efficient way to store them, it's going to cost a lot in staff time. Employees might have to review millions of e-mails to find which ones deal with the plaintiff.