Using MS Outlook Auto Archive

 

Do you use MS Outlook to send and receive e-mail, a common practice in many business settings? Has your e-mail become a filing cabinet filled with months, or even years of old messages? Do any of these old messages contain sensitive or personal information?

 

Keeping a large number of old e-mails creates a target for hackers and cyber-criminals. As an OPSEC best practice you should not retain old e-mail within MS Outlook. Once you have read and if necessary responded to an e-mail, you should delete that e-mail from the system. The Auto Archive Settings in MS Outlook will allow you to do this automatically.

To set-up Auto Archives click on:  File - Options - Advanced - AutoArchive Settings...

The Auto Archive Settings allow you to set a frequency in days, week, or months for items to be cleaned out of your e-mail folders. It is a good idea to delete e-mail that is more than a month old. This keeps your e-mail folders small, and reduces that amount of information that could be compromised if your e-mail account was hacked. Establishing an e-mail retention policy that requires e-mail to be deleted on a frequent basis helps to shield you against records requests, discovery motions, journalistic queries, and government seizures. You can’t be forced to disclose that which doesn’t exist. If there is an e-mail that you think you may need more than a month after you received it, you can always save it to an encrypted folder on your computer.