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Because when you get a subpoena for everyone's email, it's less disruptive fetching it off the mail server than taking the hard drives out of everybody's workstations.

>why companies keep around big, easily subpoena-able email databases.

Because in many jurisdictions it is required by law.

(edit) For publicly traded companies that is.

Maybe for certain business activity, like I dunno, HIPAA related stuff. But I'd be shocked if there are any statutes requiring email retention across an entire organization.

i dont know the specifics but i'm fairly sure sarbanes oxley specifies that emails should be retained within their document retention guidelines.

I really doubt sarbox says anything about email.

Eric Schmidt of Google claims to delete essentially all his e-mails:

http://www.slate.com/id/2249124/pagenum/all

POP3 means that if someone loses their laptop, someone else can access all your internal emails. Or if someone's harddrive dies you no longer have a backup of email.