[wegs2]

That's not how FOIA works. It's a good thing too. Government employees almost always fight FOIA requests. There aren't many subjective tools (e.g. overbroad) and you're certainly not required to say why you're making the request.

Data privacy laws in the US are unfortunately minimal. The bigger problem comes from imbalance -- if the government and corporations have lists of names, people need them to in order to be able to work together and organize.

If you don't think this information should go out in FOIA requests, the tool to accomplish that is data destruction. Government could wipe old emails once no longer relevant.

[Spooky23]

Email is really difficult because retention law and regulation is based on a topic.

To meet federal requirements, information about procuring equipment with certain grants must be maintained for 10 years. Caseworker notes for a minor who is a ward of the state may be required to be kept for 20 years after the 18th birthday.

If a record is deemed in scope and topical, an employee could be committing a crime by deleting that email. As a result, the easy answer is retain.

[sverhagen]

Commercial organizations at least are known to implement maximum allowed retention strategies, such as having their staff not keep archived email beyond three months, presumably so it doesn't embarrassingly show up when it's legally unfavorable. Not quite the same, but along the same lines.