rEal-mail is Evidence?
November 19th, 2004 by Adam Cuothe
Susan Kuchinskas at Internet.com discusses the Microsoft e-mail cover-up exercise
“Now, court documents claim, Burst.com has evidence that Microsoft followed a policy of deliberately destroying e-mail that could be used as evidence against it. Legal documents made public on Wednesday include evidence of a 1995 “do-not-save-e-mail directive,” and a “30-Day E-Mail Destruction Rule” promulgated by Jim Allchin, group vice president of Platforms.”
Could just be sound management of storage space. Then again, if Google can give the world unlimited e-mail storage forever, one would expect Microsoft to have the cash to do it for its own employees. Maybe it has more to do with Exchange’s capabilities. ;->
In any case, this raises some issues on content and document management, not to mention internal search and taxonomy applications. If companies are going to have to save everything, seems we’ll need to continue improving our internal indexing and management practices. Back to Google and gmail–h’m. Let’s let them inside our companies a little more, maybe the big Gs can help.
The real issue I’d like to point out, is why should we consider e-mail acceptable as evidence? It’s really quite simple to create false e-mails, or hey, look I can print out an e-mail that I just wrote on my word processor and never actually sent, sure looks the same. Does that mean I can make my own evidence as required? Perhaps someone can enlighten me on how this works out in a court.
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