I could swear I read an article a couple of years ago about a wall street bank losing an obstruction charge specifically because of an email retention policy ju

I could swear I read an article a couple of years ago about a wall street bank losing an obstruction charge specifically because of an email retention policy just like you described. Bigger picture, we all know that the reason companies implement email retention policies is to minimize the risk of the discovery process in any potential lawsuit - practically the cost of storage is nil so any savings there is a drop in the bucket. The policies are huge productivity killers for all employees -- everyone I know who has worked under such conditions has had at least one case where they needed information from an expired email that they had not personally archived. The only reason for a company to shoot itself in the foot with a policy like that is because it is easy to imagine a one-shot potential million dollar liability loss compared to the essentially unmeasurable productivity loss spread across the entire company on a daily basis.