University Times

If you want to ensure the privacy of your electronic communications at Pitt, youíre probably safer using telephone voice-mail rather than computer e-mail – although that depends on the system you use, and whether youíre sending or receiving messages.

Just pressing a "delete" button rarely makes an e-mail message disappear. Most get stored somewhere, for days, months, even years.

During that time, employers can read stored messages. Courts can subpoena them. They can be the equivalent of an incriminating letter you thought youíd destroyed but actually left in your bossís desk or spouseís dresser drawer.

Voice-mail messages arenít necessarily any more private than e-mail per se. But at Pitt, the Universityís AT&T Intuity Audix voice-mail system enables faculty, staff and students to permanently delete their own messages.

The Pitt system retains unopened voice-mail messages for 30 days. After that, the system automatically deletes them.

Once a voice-mail message has been opened (that is, somebody has listened to it) and the recipient chooses to save it, the Intuity Audix system stores the message for seven days. Re-opening a message (listening to it again) and saving it renews its storage life for an additional seven days. This week-by-week saving can be continued indefinitely.

But the bottom line is that when the recipient ñ or the Pitt system ñ deletes a voice-mail message, the message is gone forever, said Pitt telecommunications director Bruce A. Hutchison.

Of course, storage policies vary from employer to employer, and voice-mail messages that you leave on systems outside the University may have shorter or longer shelf lives.

As for e-mail, Pittís Computing and Information Systems (CIS) office makes backup copies of all messages sent or received through Pittís UNIX time-sharing system and all messages received through the Universityís VMS system ñ regardless of whether those messages have been deleted by the employees and students sending and receiving them. (CIS also keeps copies of VMS messages sent by students and employees but only when users also have sent copies of those messages to themselves.)

"We do this as a kind of disaster protection system, so that if someone accidently deletes an important message it isnít lost forever," said John Martin, Pitt manager of networked systems services.

CIS recycles its backup tapes every six-to-eight weeks, Martin said. But CIS may store an individual message for as long as several years, he said, depending on when it was sent or received. CIS makes copies at the end of each academic term of e-mail messages still on the backup system at that time, Martin explained.

"If your message happens to be on one of those end-of-term backup tapes, it will end up in our archives, where we will store it for at least one year and maybe for as long as several years," he said.

(Faculty, staff and students who want to avoid such an eventuality should steer clear of sending or receiving e-mail on Pitt systems late in a semester, Martin said.)

He emphasized that CIS stores only messages relayed through the Universityís UNIX and VMS time-sharing systems. Many Pitt employees and students route their e-mail through outside systems ñ each of which may have its own archival policy, Martin pointed out.

"Encryptian" is one e-mail security option thatís unavailable to voice-mail users. Through encryptian software, e-mailers scramble their messages in such a way that they can be read only by recipients with access to the appropriate de-scrambling software.

Information on free UNIX encryptian software is available by logging onto UNIX and, at the monitor prompt, typing: man pgp ("PGP" stands for "pretty good privacy").

Bruce Steele