"Ninety day e-mail deletion policies address the growing burden and IT cost of corporate e-mail stores, but not the legal requirements for e-mail lifecycle management. In the end, the increasing costs of e-mail storage pale in comparison to the risk and cost of businesses not paying attention to electronic records compliance and e-discovery." by Lynn Haber for October 3,2006 for Symantec
Small businesses we have advised do not have the resources to comply with this law. Most of them have never experienced litigation and have no idea of how to comply with a discovery request. Failure to comply can be very serious and expensive.
Paper documents are easy. Put them in a box and throw them in the closet for seven years. Electronic data is not so easy for a company without an IT department.
We wrote this program for clients using Outlook© 2007 on desktop computers without Microsoft Exchange Server. The program was installed on each computer and run periodically. We accessed their network monthly and merged and compressed all the databases into one and saved it to an outside server.
If you can click a button with a mouse, you can run this program. It will do all the work for you.
Give it a try http://www.smallbsystems.com/sbs/OutlookUtility.htm