It's obviously false, there are a number of regulations which would require G. to keep his communications on record for years, which is really established and well understood despite the commons here seeming to disagree with me.
More than likely Schmidt may have said something along the lines of deleting anything more than 3 days old because at the pace of his business, it's 'time out' and not relevant. But that's just a matter of his peculiar communications style. That the label has changed to 'archive' doesn't mean anything really from a corporate perceptive.
So yes, illegal to actually delete, and seemingly impractical to bump from one's inbox, but perhaps at 'Google Speed' there's some reason for it (and maybe there's a big caveat i.e. anything that's 'starred' or whatever doesn't get deleted, or, maybe anything older than 3 days that's opened or unopened gets deleted).
I doubt that because it's probably illegal. Execs have to keep copies of things they write around.
EDIT: For those who are wondering, here is a quick summary [1].
Eric Schmidt's emails are definitely kept around a very long time, for very legal reasons, and whatever he happens to do with his own personal 'inbox' is not relevant to the subject at hand, and amounts to a kind of personal email/habit choice.
To suggest '72 hours' in response to a discussion about legal discovery etc. is basically misleading in that regard.
Execs themselves don’t, they just have to be kept around. The policies are most likely enforced through Gmail’s retention settings which are set by IT, who can view all of the mail (regardless of whether it was deleted from the user’s mailbox) in Vault.
Yes, of course, 'execs' don't manage anything on their own, but the OP is talking about 'email retention' in the context of litigation and discovery i.e. 'a copy' irrespective of label, which is a legal requirement.
Eric Schmidt is not deleting his emails after 72 hours for the reason you mentioned and certainly the company is not, which is the salient issue.
One could say 'oh that's just from his inbox' but that's pointless in the context of this conversation because we're talking about 'If the corporation has a copy or not' i.e. 'IT' etc..
Scmidt deleting maybe a local copy after 72 hours doesn't really have anything to do with anything other than his personal email habits.
Eric Schmidt’s retention policy was 72 hours.