Email Archiving and FOIA: San Diego’s Proposed Email Retention Laws Prompts Outrage

Email archiving is a very useful system for nearly every business, government, and organization. Because of this, email archiving and request for open records seem to come into the spotlight frequently. The benefits of having a reliable and affordable email archiving plan and system, by employing a professional company, are numerous.

San Diego is one of the cities that recently have gotten the spotlight for news related to email archiving. This article explains how the events unfolded and how the public perceived a proposed change to the email retention laws policy.

Changing the Email Retention Laws

Last week San Diego’s interim Mayor, Todd Gloria announced a plan that would consist of the city permanently deleting any email older than one year. This plan was to be set in place on March 28th. He claimed that this would be a huge cost savings for the city and well worth it.

Public Reaction

Public reaction was not positive about this change. Journalists and citizens alike complained about how the deletion of emails could lose the city important evidence. Proof of what local leaders were saying and doing would be lost since email has become a primary mode of communication.

What Next?

However, now that the new mayor is in office it seems that this policy may not ever be put into effect. On his first day in office, Mayor Kevin Faulconer stated that the proposal by Gloria would be put on hold. He stated that the policy needed to be reviewed before a decision would be made. All city emails would be stored until a review and final decision was made.

OUCH! – Worth the cost?

The true reason why the idea of deleting emails was raised was due to the cost of archiving the emails. The city had not set aside the estimated cost of the system. The current email archiving system was put into place in 2008 and would archive any emails over 90 days old.  This was costing the city around $400,000 to $500,000; it is like stealing money from the taxpayers.  The key is to have an affordable email archiving solution options that can be geared for local government particular needs.

The bigger problem is in addition to needing enough space to store all of the emails, there are security and privacy measures that need to be considered. Archiving emails for a city can be very different from archiving them for a business. The ability to access previous correspondence and data can be incredibly useful at times.

Click here to see the demo of how your city can comply with the email retention laws using an affordable email archiving solution.

Adnan Olia

As the chief operating officer and co-founder of Intradyn, Adnan brings 20+ years of experience in the email retention and archiving space to shape Intradyn’s archiving solutions. As COO, Adnan oversees the company’s financial and human resources operations and takes the lead in managing the original equipment manufacturer relationship. Adnan provides wide-ranging oversight of Intradyn’s day-to-day operations to drive greater operational efficiency and grow the company’s global capabilities.

Along with his business partner, Adnan successfully spun out Intradyn’s archiving business from Mirapoint Software Inc., where he held the position of vice president. Mirapoint Software was primarily focused on archiving solutions for program offices, customer support, corporate infrastructure and the supply chain. Prior to that, Adnan managed complex Internet Channel group projects at eFunds Corporation (now Fidelity National Information Services).

Adnan holds a Bachelor of Science degree from Minnesota State University and a Master of Business Administration in IT and Finance from the University of St. Thomas.