Okay. . . on the one hand, I get it.  The member firm hired a third-party provider and that third party should have retained emails in some more compliant manner.  I wish that FINRA fleshed this out a bit so that we knew whether there was a failure to retain any, some, or all emails for a given period of time.  However, the gist here seems to be that the member firm also failed to monitor what its third-party provider was or wasn't doing. That latter lapse is likely more the point.

On the other hand (yeah, now we're here), if the third-party provider marketed itself as savvy on email retention matters and had other industry clients and this omission was an oversight by the provider or a system glitch, then $30,000 is a pretty large number.

All of which brings me back to a long-standing quibble that I have with many regulatory sanctions.  There has to be serious consideration given to intentional and inadvertent violations, and just because a settling respondent has the bucks to pay $X in fines, doesn't mean that a regulator should be happy to get the dollars.  The problem is that the next firm down the line may not be so flush with cash and FINRA will point to the $X settlement as some precedent.