Email Policies - Some Resources

I think a lot about governance in projects I work on: who is going to do what, who is going to oversee it, and how things will be maintained. A big piece of the picture are policies, guidelines and procedures. Without this type of documentation, employees in an organization do not have guidance on how things should function.

In the past, teams would have worked together to learn from each other how things should work; however, we don't typically have the luxury of working with the same two people over many years to have the luxury of leaving everything unwritten. We need to be able to understand how our work fits into the bigger structure of the whole (big?) organization.

The other day I had a great question from a friend:  Did I have any resources for writing an email policy? Where would I start in writing a policy about email retention?

I did my typical look through my go-to resources, and didn't find anything. So, I took a bigger look around. What I found was pretty helpful, so I thought I would post it here for for my own benefit and that of anyone else also looking.

AIIM seems to have some things that might be helpful:

• This article is essentially things to look at when compiling an email policy:  http://www.aiim.org/Research-and-Publications/Research/eBooks/Content-Records-Management/8-Things-to-Remember-When-Implementing-an-E-Mail-Policy

• Some overview discussion of the issues: http://www.aiim.org/community/wiki/view/Email-Management

• Lots of standards and best practices listed here: http://www.aiim.org/Community/Wiki/view/AIIM-Best-Practice---Email-Management-Maturity-Matrix

• Finally, I had this "Email Charter" in my Delicious bookmarks (not from AIIM) which may prove to provide some additional inspiration: http://emailcharter.org/

And related:

• Best practices for email management
  http://www.aiim.org/community/wiki/view/Best-Practices-for-Email-Management

Finally, if you are looking for helpful examples of policies, Google "email model policy". I was going to post some good examples here, but no doubt that is something which will change over time so perhaps best for us to look as needed.

Do you have any favourite email policy resources? Or tips on what to include in a policy?