When Strata Business Lives in Personal Inboxes, It Leaves With the Person
A council member emails a contractor from their personal Gmail to sort out a leak. The contractor replies. There's a bit of back-and-forth about scheduling, a quote, a revised quote, a note about the paint colour they matched on the exterior. The work gets done. Everyone moves on.
Two years later, that council member sells their unit and moves away. And the entire thread—the quote, the contractor's direct contact, the paint code, the warranty terms buried in message four—goes with them. It was never anywhere else. It lived in one person's inbox, and when they left, it left too.
This is one of the most common ways a strata quietly loses its own history, and if you spend any time in BC strata discussion groups, you'll see councils describing it in almost exactly those words: we used personal emails for everything, and when people moved away we lost everything from paint codes to warranty details. It's such a recognizable problem that councils have invented their own fixes for it—and those fixes are worth looking at closely, because they get you halfway there.
The fix councils reach for: a central email account
Ask around, and you'll find a lot of BC councils have landed on the same idea independently: set up one central strata email account—usually a free Gmail—and run all council business through it. Change the password when council turns over. Have the president send from it and cc everyone. Forward anything important into it so there's a record.
This is a genuinely good instinct, and it solves the first half of the problem. The history stops living in personal inboxes. It sits in one account the strata controls, survives the annual turnover, and gives the council a single searchable place where the story of the building actually accumulates. Councils who've done this describe it as a lifesaver, and they're right to.
It's also, notably, the responsible thing to do. More on that below—because there's a legal dimension here that most councils only discover the hard way.
Why the central inbox only gets you halfway
Here's the catch. A central email account fixes where the history lives. It doesn't fix how you get anything back out of it.
Picture that account three years in. It holds thousands of messages—vendor quotes, owner complaints, management updates, AGM logistics, five separate threads about the same recurring plumbing issue, and a decade of forwarded receipts. Now try to answer a simple question: when did we last service the boiler, who did it, and were we happy with them?
You're searching a giant inbox by keyword, hoping you remember the contractor's name or the month it happened. The thread exists, somewhere, but an email account isn't organized around your building—it's organized around dates and senders. There's no "boiler" you can click to see its whole history. There's no list of approvals you can scan. The information is stored, but it isn't structured, and for a council trying to make a decision or brief a new member, stored-but-unstructured is only marginally better than lost.
Email is a fantastic system for sending and receiving. It was never designed to be your building's maintenance record. Asking it to be one is like asking a filing cabinet to write you a summary.
The part the Strata Property Act has an opinion about
This is where the central-inbox instinct turns out to be more than good housekeeping.
Under section 35 of the Strata Property Act, a strata corporation is required to prepare and retain specific records—and the list explicitly includes correspondence sent or received by the strata corporation and council. Section 36 then gives owners (and in some cases former owners) the right to inspect that correspondence and get copies, and the strata generally has to comply within two weeks. Retention periods for these records are set out in the regulations.
Read that against the personal-inbox habit and the problem is obvious. If council business is being conducted from private email accounts, the strata's official correspondence is scattered across the personal mailboxes of whoever happened to send it—people who rotate off council, change email addresses, and move away. When an owner exercises their right to inspect that correspondence, or when a dispute makes it legally necessary to produce it, a council with no central record is in a genuinely difficult spot. There are BC councils who've learned this during litigation, when lawyers pointed out that strata business was sitting in a former president's personal account—and, in some cases, raised the prospect of having to subpoena a private phone or inbox to get at it.
None of this is meant as legal advice; every strata's situation is different and worth confirming with a professional. But the direction of the law is clear enough to act on: the correspondence is the strata's record, so it should live somewhere the strata actually holds. A central account is a real step toward that. It's just not the finish line.
Where Pleno fits
Everything above is the problem. Here's the workflow we think closes the gap—and it's built to sit on top of the email habits councils already have, not replace them.
Pleno turns email threads into maintenance cards: structured entries organized around your building instead of your inbox. Each card gathers what actually matters—the vendor, the job, the approvals, the outcome—into one place you can look up later without keyword-guessing.
The capture is designed to be nearly effortless:
- A Gmail add-on lets you open a vendor or council thread, click the Pleno icon in the sidebar, and turn it into a maintenance card—pre-filled from the email—without leaving Gmail. It works on desktop and mobile.
- Or just forward the thread to Pleno, and it creates the card for you—handy when you're on the go or the add-on isn't in front of you.
- Every card created from an email keeps a link back to the original Gmail thread, so the card gives you the clean, structured summary, and the source conversation is always one click away when you need the full detail.
The result is the best of both halves. The history stops living in personal inboxes and starts living somewhere the strata controls—but instead of a searchable-if-you're-lucky pile of messages, you get a record organized around the building itself: every contractor, every approval, every job, ready to look up in seconds and ready to hand to whoever sits on council next.
Your council will turn over. Your members' inboxes will come and go. The building's history shouldn't have to leave with them.
Pleno helps strata councils keep a building journal they own and control—a running record of maintenance, decisions, and building history that carries forward through every council change, independently of the property management company.