After wasting £25,000 on an IT system from Northgate designed to deal with postal votes which didn't work on election day, Reading Borough Council are launching a new Email Archiving System supplied by the same company for all council employees.

With the new system, Council employees will be able to file their emails in several categories of archive folder with different retention rules as determined by the Head of Legal Services. They are: 6 Months Retention which will retain the email for 6 months then delete it automatically so that Freedom of Information requests will find nothing incriminating; Never Received It which will remove all the smtp headers and make it appear that the sender is lying about sending in the email if they demand to know why nothing has been done and Martin Salter which will delete all traces of the email according to US Department of Defence standard 5220-22.M and email the sender's address to the Internet Watch Foundation for follow up action.