Get Full Government Meeting Transcripts, Videos, & Alerts Forever!
Get email alerts on the Email Retention topic
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
Grant County rolls out July 1 email-retention policy with hands-on training for commissioners
Summary
Grant County staff led a practical training for commissioners on the county's new email-retention policy, stressing that emails will be automatically deleted after three years and urging officials to save important attachments to backed-up county drives before the July 1 implementation.
Grant County staff led a hands-on session for the board to explain how the county's new email-retention policy will work and how commissioners should save records ahead of a July 1 implementation.
The coordinator, who led the training, told commissioners the policy will automatically delete email data after three years and urged officials to save important attachments and email threads to backed-up servers or department drives rather than relying on the inbox as a long-term file cabinet. "Retention is different than storage," the coordinator said, adding that department drives (for example the coordinator's F drive) are backed up while desktop files and thumb drives are not.
The training covered step-by-step procedures: right-click an attachment and use "Save As" to store documents to a chosen drive; to save an email thread without attachments, use File → Print and select Adobe PDF to create a savable PDF. Staff also reviewed anti-phishing best practices, including checking the sender's full email address (for example, a county address will end in @grantcountymn.gov), hovering over names to reveal addresses, and using the mail client's "PHISH" reporting button. The coordinator advised, "If you're not sure, please don't click on any links," and suggested sending a snip of suspicious mail to Morris Electronics for a safety check.
The board heard that a shared commissioners drive exists but has not yet been activated; staff said they can make a commissioners drive available and apply folder-level restrictions if individual privacy is needed. Department heads will repeat the training in a separate session so they can serve as "train-the-trainer" resources for their teams.
The training was framed as a practical step to ensure that materials needed for long-term recordkeeping are preserved outside email before the automatic three-year deletion takes effect on July 1. Staff said no immediate action is required by the board beyond adopting new habits for saving records, and they will return to department heads to implement the training more broadly.
