> That's to prevent leaks from driving the stock price up, and causing the buyout cost to increase. That's a little different than using it to hide the fact that they were knowingly breaking the law. Do you understand the difference?

You're making the assumption that they did it for that reason. It could be that covering up the crimes was just a side effect.

I keep all my e-mail in gmail forever, and it's delivered substantial business benefits. If someone asks me for details of something I did fifteen years ago, I can pull it up with ease.

Other than covering up crimes, what advantage do you imagine would be worth the loss of those benefits?

Well, in the current context, deleting stuff that could be used against you in a lawsuit. Doesn't need to be something you did that was wrong but maybe just something you wrote that expressed doubts about a strategy, for example.

But there's also just cleaning out all the cruft which makes finding useful stuff harder. Since going all-in on Gmail, I delete far less than I used to and that's not entirely a bad thing but I also have to sift through a lot more stuff when I'm looking for something.

> deleting stuff that could be used against you in a lawsuit.

> Doesn't need to be something you did that was wrong

Deleting something that can be produced of evidence of wrong-doing is illegal all by itself.

Leaks can be incredibly expensive. Millions of dollars of lost revenue.

Yes I do; and the F500 Cs I know use it for both purposes. There's somewhat of a code of honor between F500-level execs that anything said in private stays private; you need to be able to have frank backchannel conversations without worrying about antitrust or regulatory problems. Most common is when a communication is rather innocent, but taken out of context or worded in the wrong way it could look very bad.