When the CEO Wants His Hotmail

Not only do most of us not have a secretary tidying up our e-mail inbox each evening, but we also have many alternative inboxes for our business correspondence. For work, a busy executive may have an office e-mail account, a Blackberry for around-the-clock access and an online mail account (such as through Gmail, Hotmail or Yahoo!) for convenience when traveling. He or she probably also has a personal account for non-business e-mail, like jokes, that must be kept out of the firm's accounts. Going through 'the file' has become an exercise not only in finding the appropriate messages and attachments, but in simply identifying all places and accounts where 'the file' might exist. Indeed, multiple accounts often are created by employees to bypass the hassles of security measures and record-retention policies diligently created by IT departments who often diligently enforce these polices and whose employees read and apply the information in publications like this one.