Twin Valley builds in legal protection

Companies must provide emails within 24 hours if requested for crime prevention

Time taken to find emails has been cut by 70 per cent

Housing organisation Twin Valley Homes has improved its email archiving system to protect against legal liability for the content of emails.

The system, from vendor Waterford, has cut the time to find emails by 70 per cent.

‘A recipient can claim damages if the content of an email is offensive,’ said Lee Richardson, network manager at Twin Valley. ‘This will provide protection.’

Richardson says the system also helps Twin Valley to comply with email retention laws. ‘For legal reasons we delete fewer emails so we need a decent system to track them,’ he said.

Companies must provide emails within 24 hours if requested for crime prevention, but Cambridge University security expert Richard Clayton says the law is mainly targeted at telecoms firms or internet service providers.