i beg to differ, my wife works in loss prevention and is quite adept at catching shoplifters. she has been responsible for significantly reducing shrink and bringing a number of stores back into good standing regarding loses. effective loss prevention is making the environment undesirable for shoplifters while not inconveniencing the customer. all door nazis do is irritate and annoy paying customers while doing little to deter theft.

actually long term email retention can hurt you more than help you in some situations.

our company is going through a restatement right now and if we had only had emails going back 6 months the auditors would have looked through those emails and been done. but since we had emails going back almost 8 years via backup tapes, they decided to go through all of them looking for pertinent emails. which then uncovered even more issues to be dealt with and of course these auditing firms charge by the hour. so not only has the restatement much longer than anticipated, but at a much greater cost to the company.

so we are now looking at implementing a strict 90 day retention on email. but i know this will piss off a lot of users as some have emails in excess of 5 years in PST file. I actually welcome it because some genius in my company thought it would be a good idea to save PSTs to network shares for each individual user. which means I spend an inordinate amount of time remapping drives and reconnecting pst files in outlook.