Important Notes On The “Seven Day Delete Policy” In Perry’s Office

I neglected last week to point everyone to an important post by Charles Kuffner at Off The Kuff. In that post, Charles took issue with the deletion of emails after seven days by the governor’s office and checked out state policies on records retention:

Meanwhile, the Texas Observer noted the strange comment about deleted emails as I did, and dug up the official state policy for email retention:

(1) Administrative Correspondence, 1.1.007 - Incoming/outgoing and internal correspondence, in any format, pertaining to the formulation, planning, implementation, interpretation, modification, or redefinition of the programs, services, or projects of an agency and the administrative regulations, policies and procedures that govern them. Subject to Archival review. Retention: 3 years.
(2) General Correspondence, 1.1.008 - Non-administrative incoming/outgoing and internal correspondence, in any media, pertaining to or arising from the routine operations of the policies, programs, services, or projects of an agency. Retention: 1 year.

More good stuff from Charles:

Note that this describes how long the employee should keep the emails in question - a subsequent section talks about different methods for doing this, and documents how to create a personal folder file (PST) in Outlook. It still doesn’t address my point about server backups. Once an email has been filed into a PST, it’s there forever unless you know what you’re doing, and if that PST lives on a network drive, there may well be a backup of it on tape somewhere.

Bear in mind too that even if Rick Perry deleted all correspondence with Alfonso Royal, in apparent violation of the aforementioned policy, can he say for sure that Royal and anyone else who might have been cc’ed did so as well? Did Perry and Royal delete their Sent Items, or the archive.pst file that Outlook loves to create on a regular basis? Email is a lot more persistent than you might think.

Bottom line: An open records request here, especially one that specifies all the possible places a “deleted” email could be lurking, might yield some very interesting results.

Such an open records request would indeed yield, I suspect, amazing results. However, it would cost a bucket full of cash because it would likely require forensic examination of computers and backup tapes. And, the state can charge for that.

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