Two rival approaches to email have emerged from information governance thought: the defensible deletion approach, in which emails are routinely deleted from email accounts after a set period of time; and the Capstone approach, in which the email accounts of important government officials are selected for permanent preservation. This paper aims to assess the extent to which the defensible deletion approach, when used in conjunction with efforts to move important emails into corporate records systems, will meet the needs of originating government departments and of wider society.,The paper forms the first stage of a realist evaluation of policy towards UK government email.,The explanation advanced in this paper predicts that the routine deletion of email from email accounts will work for government departments even where business email is inconsistently or haphazardly captured into records systems, provided officials have access to their own emails for a long enough period to satisfy their individual operational requirements. However the routine deletion of email from email accounts will work for wider society only if and when business email is consistently captured into other systems.,The paper looks at the policy of The National Archives (TNA) towards UK government email and maps it against the approaches present in records management and information governance thought. It argues that TNA’s policy is best characterised as a defensible deletion approach. The paper proposes a realist explanation as to how defensible deletion policies towards email work in a government context.

中文翻译：

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可辩护地删除政府电子邮件

信息治理思想中出现了两种相互竞争的电子邮件方法：防御性删除方法，即定期在一段时间后从电子邮件帐户中删除电子邮件；以及Capstone方法，其中选择了重要政府官员的电子邮件帐户进行永久保存。本文旨在评估防御性删除方法在与将重要电子邮件转移到公司记录系统中的努力配合使用时，将在多大程度上满足始发政府部门和整个社会的需求。对英国政府电子邮件政策的真实评估。，本文的高级解释是，即使官员将电子邮件长时间或连续地捕获到记录系统中，也可以将它们从电子邮件帐户中定期删除，即使商务电子邮件被不一致地或偶然地捕获到记录系统中，也将对政府部门有效。个人操作要求。但是，只有当企业电子邮件始终被捕获到其他系统中时，从电子邮件帐户中常规删除电子邮件才能为更广泛的社会使用。本文研究了国家档案局（TNA）对英国政府电子邮件的政策，并将其与记录管理和信息治理思想中存在的方法。它认为，TNA的政策最好被描述为可辩护的删除方法。