Gainesville, Florida, put its internal emails online with few limits

There shouldn't be any legal issues since it's already all public, but regardless there is some possible middle ground here:

- All conversations regarding public policy and/or the allocation of public resources get published on the web by default. (With the possibility of making redactions on anonymizing folks, at the discretion of the public official.)

- Things like emails from constituents asking for advice about personal issues and bulk newsletters would stay private unless FOIA'd.

- Anything redacted or anonymized at the discretion of a public official can still be FOIA'd, and in the FOIA'd version of the email things would only be allowed to the redacted or anonymized to the extent allowable by law.

This is similar to how NYC's proposed algorithmic transparency legislation would have worked, where software involved in allocating public resources needs to be public but the rest of the software does not.

Personal details can be redacted, and some things can be marked as not for public view, but doing so tends to be inviting scrutiny, as the big media organisations have people trawling the post journals.

So many cities have people untrained on this sort of stuff, I know there's been cities or other departments in cities deleting Facebook comments, and there's been some lawsuits over that. I kinda always got a feeling public officials feel like they are gods and above the law. Plus I think local officials can get away with things more compared to say a congress person or president since stuff they say and do have a bigger spot light on them. Probably more corruption happens at the local level is an assumption I've always had.

Then if you go on YouTube can find tons of videos where cops or city officials get mad at being filmed, people go into the lobby of their local city and film the clerk there and some of them freak out or even goes as far as assaulting the camera person. However, I think some of those YouTubers though do it just to kinda just stir things up to see how people react so they'll get views, but technically it's still a first amendment protected activity.

City and other government contact pages should have big red flags making it clear that your correspondence could be made public at any time.

Even the record of correspondence with a government agency should be considered PII and/or sensitive, depending on the agency and subject matter.

But there does need to be a warning to the public that their emails are going to be public. Just so they aren't surprised and can schedule a call instead of going into detail via email.

It’s pretty trivial to supervise email in O365 or Google, so if you’re a risk or someone feels like it, it’s likely your communications are getting looked at.