E-Mails with big attachments and tracing the content (Legal stuff)

Question

E-Mails with big attachments and tracing the content (Legal stuff)

Tonito Dux 976

Hi,

I want to hear your opinions on how does your company keep big e-mails (over 20-30mb) in order that the e-mails can be pulled out from the archive in couple of years if it comes to a legal dispute?

Our company has to keep all e-mails related to a project for 20 years. The problems are with e-mails that contain big files, .pdf-s for example that are 10-20-30mb big. We use journaling in Exchange, and every incoming/outgoing e-mail is saved then later to a .pst file monthly. I would like to teach my colleagues to use OneDrive and share the files but my CIO says that we cannot track what was sent, the contents of the files inside the e-mail. If it comes to a legal dispute we cannot prove that the file on that date in 2021 had that content, and we are talking about infrastructure projects.

Any thoughts?

Cheers

1 answer

Your answer

Answer 1

Yuki Sun-MSFT 41,376 Moderator

Hi @Tonito Dux ,

When it comes to large attachments, agree with what you have mentioned, saving files to a cloud service like onedrive and then sharing a link would be the best practice, see :
Send large files with Outlook

As regards to your concern about tracking the contents of the files inside the message when journaling, I am assuming that you can look at the permission stuff of the cloud storage. For instance, as far as I know, a SharePoint document library can be set to not allow users to delete files, so you can create a particular document library for users to upload the large attachments for sharing, and meantime prevent them from deleting any files by setting the permissions.

If an Answer is helpful, please click "Accept Answer" and upvote it.
Note: Please follow the steps in our documentation to enable e-mail notifications if you want to receive the related email notification for this thread.

Tonito Dux 976 Reputation points

2021-03-11T11:44:50.72+00:00

Hi,

you are correct, but still does not solve the problem I described because the files will not stay in the cloud for the next 20 years...
Yuki Sun-MSFT 41,376 Reputation points Moderator

2021-03-12T07:28:11.957+00:00

Hi @Tonito Dux ,

May I know what is your main concern about this problem? If you are worry about that the large PST files caused by big attachments will occupy too much local storage, then to the best of my knowledge, asking the users to save attachments to cloud could be the best option.

If you just have concern about the large sized PST files, you may consider specifying a shared network drive for file sharing and see if it's possible to remove the delete permission of the users.

If an Answer is helpful, please click "Accept Answer" and upvote it.
Note: Please follow the steps in our documentation to enable e-mail notifications if you want to receive the related email notification for this thread.
Yuki Sun-MSFT 41,376 Reputation points Moderator

2021-03-17T08:19:48.413+00:00

Hi @Tonito Dux ,

I'd like to follow up to see how things are going on with this thread. Should there is any further questions or concerns regarding this thread, feel free to post back.

If an Answer is helpful, please click "Accept Answer" and upvote it.
Note: Please follow the steps in our documentation to enable e-mail notifications if you want to receive the related email notification for this thread.
Tonito Dux 976 Reputation points

2021-03-17T09:45:09.03+00:00

Hi,

main concern is proving something in the far future. I think we will continue to do this over the e-mail.

Thank you anyway for your help.
Yuki Sun-MSFT 41,376 Reputation points Moderator

2021-03-17T09:49:59.813+00:00

Hi @Tonito Dux ,

That's understandable. Thanks for the response.

If an Answer is helpful, please click "Accept Answer" and upvote it.
Note: Please follow the steps in our documentation to enable e-mail notifications if you want to receive the related email notification for this thread.

Share via

E-Mails with big attachments and tracing the content (Legal stuff)

1 answer

Your answer