The Japanese Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism has shelved a plan to automatically delete official emails from its server one year after they are sent or received, the Mainichi Shimbun newspaper has reported.

Due to be introduced from February 1, apparently it was decided that staff were not sufficiently familiar with how to properly save correspondence.

Across the Japanese government there is a major review underway of in-house rules over document management. This includes documents that are classified as being of low importance, which can be kept for less than one year and be scrapped at the discretion of bureaucrats.

“According to the data, the Ministry of Finance started as early as January 2009 to automatically delete emails 60 days after they were sent or received.

“Furthermore, it revealed that the National Tax Agency automatically deletes emails 68 days after they are sent or received on computers that have access to the internet and public prosecutors offices do the same after two months. The Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare auto-deletes opened emails six months after they are received, while the Defense Ministry sets the retention period for emails sent or received on some of its staff's work mobile phones at 30 to 90 days.”

According to the statement released by the central government, the Finance Ministry, Tax Agency and Defense Ministry will continue the practice of auto-deleting emails, while the health ministry and prosecutor’s offices are set to reconsider whether to continue the auto-delete rule.