european-union email
Deleting incriminatory emails
<p>A public European school has an IT department with a person responsible for all mail related tasks, including the mail server.</p>

<p>Once that responsible sent an incriminatory email to a specific group of teachers, that use email accounts where the content is stored in the school mail server.</p>

<p>One of the teachers from the target group replied. From the content of the reply one can see what the responsible said initially is nonsense.</p>

<p>Then, the responsible deleted all the emails initially sent.</p>

<p>Is this allowed?</p>

<h2>There is no general legal obligation to preserve correspondence</h2>

<p>There are laws against destroying evidence but for them to come into play there would have to be a civil or criminal case underway. From your question it doesn't seem that anyone is being sued or investigated by police so there is no evidence tampering involved.</p>

<p>Individuals and organisations are free to delete whatever they want from their computers unless and until they should be aware that it is or may become evidence.</p>

<p>Whether the deletion complies with internal organisation policies and procedures is not a legal matter except in so far as it exposes the deleter to employment sanctions.</p>

<p>The only thing I can see peripherally touching would be a data breach which is the unauthorized disposal of data.</p>

<p>So, one has to ensure if the emails were deleted and are not possible to recover. If it's possible to recover, then recovery it is.</p>
