Holy Crap – We need to keep all email logs for a year
Just seen this at the bbc website (Thanks slashdot). Apparently a new law will require all ISP’s to keep email logs for all email passing through their network for a full year. Does this Government even do basic due diligence before passing new laws. Never mind the privacy aspect of this what about the costs involved? This article here has more info and provides a little more detail on the stupidity of this plan….
Currently the hosting companies I manage the servers for usually use a cron job to rotate email logs once they go over a certain size. These logs are kept for 7 rotations, ie each one is named maillog.1 maillog.2 etc. The new maillog goes to maillog.1 with each of the others being incremented by one and number 7 being deleted. I have just had a scan through a bunch of servers to see how long these logs last for and the longest is only 27 days the shortest is only 9 days. One of the hosting companies generates around 500GB of maillogs a year. These cannot be stored on the mail servers as they just don’t have space for them so this means installing a new server, configuring it for backing up maillogs and maintaining it. The cost of the hardware on its own is not insignificant but add the extra electric costs and maintenance costs for something that is not necessary and the fact that the industry hasn’t been consulted on this is just plain madness.
Way to go (yet again) El Gordo
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