As the university implements a new two-year email retention policy, employees will first need to identify email content that should be saved prior to deletion. This will largely vary depending on your role and the records you work with.
The Campus Retention Schedule
A good place to begin is the Campus Retention Schedule. It identifies records the university must keep for legal, historical, or operational reasons.
Open the sections that apply to your department and review the record types that relate to your work. If any of these records exist only in your Outlook mailbox, then you will need to ensure that they are kept per the instructions in the retention schedule.
For example, an Admissions employee may work with records that must be retained for five years after a student's matriculation. Many of those records are already stored in other university systems. If an email contains information that is not saved elsewhere and needs to be retained, that email should be preserved.
Each entry in the retention schedule will generally include a description of the record, the required retention timeframe, what the timeframe is based on, and how to deal with the record after the retention timeframe expires.
Other Important Emails
After reviewing the retention schedule, think about other emails that may be valuable to keep. Ask yourself:
Not every email needs to be saved, but these questions can help you identify the ones that matter most.
As you review your mailbox, make a list of the types of emails you want to preserve. For more information on how to find emails and save them outside of Outlook, please view the other Help Guides.
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