Unlike paper, E-mail lasts forever.
The cases are now legion in which confidential e-mails are getting hung out to dry like so much dirty linen. Executives have been embarrassed on the witness stand (Bill Gates), fired (Harry Stonecipher) and ordered off to jail (Frank Quattrone) for hitting the "send" button after typing something inappropriate for public consumption.
People have taken the advice to back up their data to heart. Even if you delete your mail and scrub the disk, backup copies abound. And so do opportunities.
One company's legal headache is another's livelihood. A Marsh & McLennan subsidiary, Kroll Ontrack, is in the business of helping lawyers find needles in haystacks. A recent assignment had it helping a corporation respond to a government antitrust inquiry by sorting 3.5 terabytes (3.5 trillion characters) of electronic documents, roughly half of them e-mail, so that an army of lawyers, working three shifts a day, 450 at a time, could probe them for telltale words.
One safeguard would be to encrypt your e-mail. Then, just hope the recipient doesn't archive it or forward it in the clear.
1 comment:
I don't see any significant difference aside from the fact that emails are convenient. As long as the message is clear it does not matter how things are delivered.
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