My peeve is that my emails disappear after 60 days and I don't have the ability to change the policy. When things fail on a quarterly occurrence I am unable to refer to previous emails

While we are on email peeves - someone at work (different branch, different state) has almost the same email as me, only one letter different. He signs up for all kinds of spam and sometimes he enters my address by mistake. I didn't realise it was all his fault until I got all the information on a boat he was buying and it had his name on all the documents. Then it all made sense why it was all spam that wasn't really related to my job - it was all for his job.

I have an e-mail doppelganger at work, different middle initial, and he works in a time-critical roll. I frequently get IMs asking me to rush or prioritize, something.

"Can I you help with this urgent matter?"
"No, .... but perhaps Casimir P Pulaski can help you."

Okay, it's terribly sad that the chap died...but it's been a year now. Stop putting up shit by the utility pole every week to mark the occasion. The stuffed teddy bears, flowers, pictures, shirts and toys look manky pretty quick and are a hazard to drive around.

He wasn't even a kid.

Don't get me started on roadside memorials.

Just put up a sign, saying "It's been a year, get over it!"

Should solve the problem.

If you have a desktop outlook installation, you can set up archiving to automatically copy or move emails to a local 'pst' file on your computer, which can act as your own personal archive. Or, you can manually achieve the same by creating local mail folder (again, a pst file) and copying emails to it on demand. The downside of this is the pst file is not backed up, unless you place it in a location that gets backed up. Your company may have a policy against that too, but they may not have the actual ability locked down.


Companies have these polices for two reasons (that I'm aware):
1) reduce storage required for emails
2) reduce legal liability.


The latter is the 'interesting' one. Apparently, if a company gets into a lawsuit, then emails are 'fair game' for evidence. So lets say you were fired for doing something, and you have an email from 2 years ago saying it was fine to do that thing. That is your proof that you were fired incorrectly. And if the company suddenly goes in and deletes all traces of YOUR email to eliminate that proof, that is an illegal action also. BUT - if the company has a POLICY to delete ALL emails after 3 months, that's perfectly legal. This happened at NVidia, when insider trading investigations occurred. They were nailed based on email evidence, so they started this exact policy.


How 'backups' tie into this I'm not sure ... I guess they delete backups too ...

Sarbanes-Oxley

There's one quite near us by a tree that a guy wrapped his van around which usually includes a can of Fosters lager tied around the tree! - classy

Are they saying he was pissed when he crashed?

Not really sure - I just assumed it was kind of a 'your still with us having a beer' kind of thing

It does look really odd!

Yep..

/many hours spent on compliance manuals.

The reason here is liability for the exact reasons you say. They don't allow pst files or archiving. Insurance and healthcare are easy targets for lawsuits because of HIPAA. SOX generally doesn't apply to the majority of healthcare companies. But it's still a PITA because very few projects only run for 2 months and Exchange search functionality is quite useful.

As for backups , they are only retained for 45 days. SOX is a lot more strict on backup retentions.

Auto-forward all emails to another email account.

That opens up a whole other hornets nest of how you store a company's IP.