The Italian Data Protection Authority has adopted
an updated version of a guideline document on email retention that
it originally issued in December 2023, but which had been
suspended.
The document is entitled 'Computer programmes and services
for email management in the workplace and metadata
processing'. With this document, the Data Protection
Authority states that it intends to provide employers with
guidelines on how to manage employee email accounts, and further
states that the measure introduces no new obligations or
responsibilities.
Firstly, in order to clarify the scope of the measure, it
defines the concept of email metadata (in place of the
mere examples contained in the previous text). Metadata is
the information automatically recorded in the logs
generated by the server systems for managing and sorting emails,
which may include sender and recipient email addresses, server IP
addresses, sending (retransmission or reception) times, message
size, the
