I would like to find any and all information possible regarding data
and email archival laws, rules, or regulations

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Request for Question Clarification by twitch-ga on 28 Sep 2002 23:32 PDT

knevet-

Are you referring to laws regarding ISPs or business. That is, mail
sent to/from and ISP or mail sent to/from a company's mail server? If
a company's server, which insustry, specifically, are you curious
about?

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Clarification of Question by knevet-ga on 29 Sep 2002 20:16 PDT

I am actually looking for the rules published by the SEC and the FDA
and other groups like them that have very specific requirments on
state agencies as well as pharmacuitical and financial companies
regarding how the archive all information from email to transactional
information and information regarding how long state infomration needs
to be kept on file.  I am an analyst for the Storage community but it
is difficult to find the actual regulations.  I was looking for some
help.

Personal opinion only - legal consequences are best answered by a
lawyer.
As far as I know there are no laws requiring or preventing archiving
of email. The laws in the US generally assume that all email belongs
to the computer system's owner, so any 'private' email you get at work
may be archived by and used for any purpose (including your
termination) by your employer. It may possibly be an offence to
destroy any work related email once a federal or other investigation
is initiated. It may be wise to destroy it before such investigation.
All of this is too new for legislation to have any effect, as can be
seen by the ineffective attempts to stop spam email.

Also, Google archives many sex newsgroups to the dismay of many
posters, and only offers limited removal options, i.e. they'll remove
your posts, but not any reply to the posts that includes the original
text.