What is the difference between the Capstone approach and printing-and-filing emails for federal recordkeeping?

Federal agencies must capture email that documents government business as a record. Two very different methods have been used to do this: the older practice of printing emails and filing the paper, and the modern Capstone approach promoted by the National Archives. Understanding the difference helps explain why most agencies moved away from paper.

Print-and-File

Under print-and-file, individual employees were responsible for deciding, message by message, whether an email was a record. If it was, they printed it and placed the paper copy in a file folder, then often deleted the electronic version.

This method has well-known weaknesses:

• It relies on each user’s judgment every day, so capture is inconsistent and easy to skip.
• It loses electronic context — metadata, attachments, distribution lists, and the ability to search the original message.
• It does not scale. High-volume inboxes make manual printing impractical, and paper is harder to preserve, retrieve, and produce for litigation or FOIA.

The Capstone Approach

Capstone is a role-based method. Instead of asking every employee to sort their own mail, an agency identifies certain accounts — typically senior officials and other “Capstone” positions — whose email is preserved in full as permanent records. Email from most other accounts is scheduled for retention and disposed of after a set period.

Key characteristics:

• Capture is automatic and account-based, not dependent on individual decisions.
• Email stays electronic, keeping metadata, searchability, and attachments intact.
• Retention is driven by the person’s role, which simplifies scheduling across a large organization.

Why It Matters

The shift reflects a broader move toward managing records electronically rather than converting them to paper. Capstone reduces the burden on staff, improves consistency, and produces records that are easier to search, transfer, and use to meet transparency and discovery obligations. Agencies adopting it generally must have their approach approved through an appropriate records schedule with the National Archives.

For more on managing email and other electronic messages, see the email and messaging topic hub.

In short, print-and-file treats each message as a manual paper task, while Capstone treats email as electronic records governed by role and schedule — a more reliable and scalable model for modern recordkeeping.