Hitting the delete button

bkrueger — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 13:57:52 -0400

State employees routinely trash millions of potential public records, according to presentations given today at the first meeting of a committee appointed by Gov. Mike Easley to review his administration's policies for retaining e-mails.

The state's public records law makes no distinction between e-mails and other types of documents that the government is required to retain and provide to the public.

George Bakolia, the chief of computer services for the Easley administration, told the committee that state employees are sent about 5.5 million e-mails a day, reports Michael Biesecker.

About 95 percent of those e-mails are immediately "declared worthless" by two layers of spam-blocking software. The remaining 270,000 e-mails are delivered to the computers of the estimated 62,100 executive branch employees with e-mail accounts.

That figure does not include the hundreds of thousands of e-mails state employees send to each other daily or those that they address to people outside state government. Each employee is allotted a limited amount of digital memory on state servers and mainframe computers.

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Hitting the delete button