We have been increasingly getting requests to automatically forward our Town email accounts for Board members and attorneys to their personal email accounts. Has anyone else has done this and are there any concerns legally with records retention doing this? When these people respond to the original e-mails, we don’t have copies of the ensuing correspondence since everything is now being done from the personal email accounts.
(In person document, Basics tab, Forwarding address)
Subject: Wrong forum for legal advice.
This is the wrong forum for asking about legal/retention concerns which certainly do exist with the forwarding scenario. Those questions most properly should be addressed by your organizations own general counsel (which is why it is surprising you mention attorneys asking for the forwarding, as they should know better!).
Subject: …
Yeah, I wouldn’t trust those.
I dont recommend forwarding to personal accounts. Its the business email and that is for a reason. They only want to have all their mail together. You will be doing them a favor but you can have some problems.
Subject: retention/records
That is exactly why this is a problem for ANY business. Once the messages start going to their personal account, every reply and reply to that reply is in the personal account. It never passes through your filters, you have no control over retention, and no ability to capture for legal reasons. You also have no control over them getting a virus on their home machine that spams itself out to all those customers/constituents.
I recommend you look closer into why they are asking for this, and see if you can find a different answer. Do they want to get these emails on their blackberry? Do they find logging into the system to be too difficult? Do they just not like the notes client? If you can find out what the problem is, you might come up with a different solution.