How long should government entities in Texas keep email? It’s one of our most frequently asked questions, and like all our favorite questions here at TSLAC, the answer is, “it depends.” Though TSLAC has traditionally recommended the “sort and file” method, these days many agencies are hoping to simplify their operations by establishing an auto-deletion…
We are happy to announce our new and updated seven-part email management webinar series. Local governments and state agencies across the State of Texas utilize email as a form of communication to transmit information and to conduct official business. From that business and communications, what happens to the emails and how do those emails relate…
I don’t know about you, but one of my least favorite chores is folding the laundry. Even though I know that leaving my clean clothes in a laundry basket creates problems—my work shirts get wrinkled, and I can never find socks that match—I still end up putting it off for days. For many government employees,…
A long time ago (relative to our blog’s history), we published the first of many frequently-asked-question articles about retention of email. The answer we give today when people ask how long to keep email is still the same (“it depends!”), but we have since published many more articles dissecting the topic. Today, we’ve compiled a…
When an employee leaves or is separated from the agency, you probably have a checklist of things that need to be done in order to close everything out for them. Hopefully, one of those things includes reviewing and transferring emails and if it doesn’t, it needs to! I recently attended a conference where one of…
Every day, our email inboxes fill up with all sorts of stuff: junk mail, meeting requests, policy updates, cat photos, leave requests, automatic response emails, blog updates. It can feel unwieldy to manage the amount and the type of email pouring in during the regular course of business. For some, the impulse is to delete…
We’ve all recently read about several government officials using personal email accounts or email servers to conduct government business. But they are not alone by any means – a recent survey of 412 high-level government employees conducted by Atlantic Media’s Government Executive Meeting Group revealed that approximately one-third of the employees surveyed said they sometimes…
Now that we all know most emails are government records – we do all know this, right?! – sometimes it can be confusing to figure out how to categorize our emails. First and foremost, always remember that email is a format, like paper or microfilm, and we decide which record series to use based on the…