Why client files don't belong in an inbox

Every April, an accountant asks a client for the same things: bank statements, a P60, the letter from the pension provider, a photo of the passport if it's changed. The client scans and attaches them to one email. The accountant replies "Got them, thanks", saves the files and both of them move on.

The files don't move on. They stay in two inboxes, the client's sent folder and the accountant's, and in both they last a great deal longer than the job they were sent for.

This is how email works. Four things about it are worth knowing if you look after other people's documents.

An inbox keeps everything

Email was built to keep messages, and it is very good at it. Nothing in a normal mailbox expires. The statements sent this April sit next to the ones from last April, and the April before that.

Deleting doesn't settle it either. A deleted email usually waits in a bin for a while first. The copy in the other person's inbox is theirs to delete, not yours. And many mailboxes are backed up or archived by the provider or the practice's IT, often a good thing, but it means one more copy of a client's passport that nobody is thinking about.

So the honest answer to "how long do we keep client files that came by email?" is, for most practices: assume indefinitely.

An inbox is built to be searched

Mail search is excellent. Type "passport" or "bank statement" and the right messages come up in a second, often matched on what's inside the attachment as well as its name.

It is useful to anyone else who can open the mailbox. Years of client documents, sorted by sender and findable by a single word.

An inbox goes everywhere you go

The same mailbox is on the office computer, the laptop, the phone, and on any old phone that was never properly wiped. Each one keeps its own copy of recent mail and attachments.

So a client's file isn't in one place. It's on every device that has ever been signed in to that account, and on every device that has ever been signed in to the client's.

And it's the first place anyone looks

When someone gets into an email account, through a reused password or a convincing sign-in page, the mailbox is what they came for. It's where password reset emails land, and where they can learn who pays whom. Often the next step is to search it for invoices, statements and identity documents and quietly set up rules that forward new mail somewhere else.

Practices are an obvious target for this. Their inboxes hold clients' documents. One account opened is many people's paperwork exposed.

Two-step sign-in, a password manager and an email provider that takes security seriously all make this much less likely. Proton Mail, for example, encrypts the messages and attachments it stores so that it can't read them itself. Once someone is signed in as you, they see what you see.

What to do instead

The aim isn't to stop using email. It's to stop using it as the place client files live.

• Ask clients to send files a different way. A link that ends after a set time, or once it's been collected, leaves nothing behind in either inbox. Your practice's client portal, if it has one, does a similar job.

• Keep the working copy where you work on it. The practice management system you already use, with its own access controls, is the place for the file. Not the email it arrived on.
• Tidy what's already there. Search your own mailbox for "passport", "statement" and "P60". What comes back is roughly what someone else would find. Saving those files properly and deleting the emails is an afternoon's work that is worth doing once.
• Tell clients why. Most of them have never thought about their sent folder. A sentence in your engagement letter goes a long way.

Refueler Share is one way to do the first of these: the file is encrypted in the sender's browser, the link ends when they choose, and nothing lands in anyone's inbox but the link.

In short

Email is still the right way to say "Got them, thanks". It just isn't the right place to keep what you got.