E-mail at UW-River Falls is received and stored on our UWRF Exchange server. You have the ability and responsibility to control what e-mail is stored in your account. Please refer to documentation that Campus Archives has provided as well for requirements of retention of specific types of e-mail for which you are responsible.
A full back-up (copy) of the e-mail stored on this server is completed nightly, and the back-up file is retained for 3 weeks. Since each individual determines what individual e-mails to retain within individual accounts, this nightly back-up may contain e-mail from over 10 years ago if you have chosen to keep them (or neglected to delete ones you don’t want).
The purpose of making back-up copies of your e-mail is to provide assistance in the event of a catastrophic situation where you have lost valuable e-mail. The Division of Technology Services would assist you in an event such as this by restoring your e-mail from Exchange server back-ups (up to 21 days ago). In addition, the Division of Technology Services is able to help retrieve any e-mail saved in your online Archive folder in OWA\Outlook which is also on the server and backed up. It is normally possible to salvage almost all of your e-mail. Exceptions to this would be e-mails that hadn’t been in the system long enough to be backed-up overnight, and e-mails stored on local devices, including your computer’s drive.
There are various folders in your e-mail account that you should be aware of (where data is backed up and can be restored):
While your e-mail can stay on the Exchange server indefinitely, most people periodically need to move e-mail to their online archive or delete it and empty Deleted Items and Sent Items to prevent having problems that arise when you reach your Exchange quota. If you get close to your quota, you will see a warning in Outlook/OWA. The default quota settings give you prior warning before you reach your quota. You will no longer be able to send e-mail when you have 800 MB or more in your Inbox and sub-folders. You will continue to receive e-mail until you hit 1 GB and then will no longer be able to send or receive e-mail. E-mails sent to your account at that point will send a message back to the person who sent to you that your account is over quota and the e-mail could not be delivered. The best way to avoid hitting your quota is to move items to your online archive and empty your Deleted Items and Sent Items folders.
We only support local archives of e-mail stored online (viewable within Outlook Web App) that we can back up and restore if necessary. This is the only option for archival that is supported within OWA/Outlook Client under your Archives provided on our campus network storage. Any data saved directly to your hard drive (C:), a thumb\jump drive, an external hard drive etc. is not managed or backed up by the Division of Technology Services and we will have a very difficult time responding to data loss should one of those devices fail. Please make sure the e-mail you wish to retain is located within Exchange (visible in OWA or Outlook Client). We may not be able to restore any other source of e-mail you have retained elsewhere.
When you send e-mail to someone, you don’t have any control over how they may distribute it to others or how it may be backed-up on their e-mail system. Likewise, you may have e-mail messages you have copied to your personally-owned or university-issued cell phone, home computer, etc. The University of Wisconsin-River Falls can’t control how long those e-mails are kept.
The same process that safeguards your e-mails in the event of catastrophic situations also makes e-mails available for open records requests. If there is an open records request that UW-River Falls must comply with, your existing e-mail data is subject to the tests of release-ability under State of Wisconsin open records law.
This would include:
IN ADDITION: If you are conducting state/university business on a private e-mail account those e-mails are also subject to open records law. For example, a UWRF employee who chooses to set his or her university e-mail up to auto-forward or redirect to a non-university provided e-mail account has exposed that personal account to a potential open records request. The bottom line is you should keep your university-related e-mail in your university e-mail account and use it for university-related work and keep personal e-mail and correspondence not related to work on a separate personal e-mail account.
