Do I have to keep every email?

No. You don’t have to keep every email forever — but you do have to keep the ones that are records, for as long as the retention schedule requires. The challenge is sorting the records from the rest without making it an impossible manual chore.

Email is kept based on content and schedule

Whether an email must be retained depends on what it documents, not on the fact that it’s email. An email that records a decision, a transaction, or an obligation is a record; routine notices, personal messages, and convenience copies generally are not. The retention period for email-that-is-a-record depends on the subject matter — an email about a contract follows the contract’s retention, not a blanket “email” rule.

The practical problem

Asking every employee to identify and file each message as a record never worked at scale — the volume is too high, and the results were inconsistent. So organizations needed a better model.

The Capstone approach

For federal agencies, NARA’s Capstone approach schedules email by the role of the account holder rather than message by message. Senior officials’ accounts are captured as permanent records; other accounts get time-based retention (kept a set number of years, then disposed of). This makes large-scale email management defensible without manual sorting.

What this means for you

• Don’t assume “keep everything” — that’s costly and increases discovery and breach exposure.
• Don’t assume “delete freely” either — email that’s a record must be retained, and must be preserved under a litigation hold when relevant to a dispute.
• The sustainable answer is automated capture and rule-based retention (like Capstone), not relying on individuals to save their own mail.