This is a noxious meme, and let's stop it now.

Yes, you can delete mail with a right-click from your account. But--assuming, for the moment, that Rove was using Microsoft's Outlook--deleting email from your account doesn't necessarily mean that the email is "lost," or "deleted" from the system. Here's why:

Outlook works by connecting a "client" on your machine (the Outlook program that you, the user, see) with a centrally located "server" that your "client" connects to. The server handles the details of routing the mail to where you sent, sending you, the user, a message if the email bounces, etc. The server also handles the details of your account that other people need to know, like your email address. The server also protects you from spam. (When you tell your "client" that you are out of the office, you are really telling the server, behind the scenes, to tell that to anybody that is sending mail to you.)

Now, one of the things that the server handles is storing your mail. Your folders look like they're on your machine, but the mail in reality is stored in a database by the Outlook server. (Of course that's the architecture; that way, if your machine dies, all your mail is not lost! It can be restored from the server.) From Microsoft's documentation for the Outlook server:

The first metric to understand is mailbox size. Knowing the amount of data that an end user is allowed to store in his or her mailbox allows you to determine how many users can be housed on the server.

Something else that the server handles is backup. Says the architect: OK, if they lose the data on their laptop, it's safe in the Outlook database. But what if the Outlook database is lost or corrupted? We need a second line of defense. Again from Microsoft:

Many administrators perform streaming online backups to a disk target. If your backup and restore design involves backup to disk, enough capacity needs to be available on the server to house the backup.

That's a second defense. But, says the architect, what if the building in which the streaming backup servers are housed catches fire, or is destroyed in an earthquake? Well, in that case, we need offsite backup: And so we put the data from the backup servers onto tape, or onto CD or onto DVD, and store it someplace underground (like, say, the vault of a bank...)

So, when Karl right-clicks a piece of mail to "delete" it, he's only deleting it from his account; from his own little area on the server (his "mailbox" as Microsoft calls it).

Here is where Karl cannot "delete" his mail from:

1. Karl cannot delete his mail from the backups.

2. Karl certainly can't delete his mail from the CDs or tapes, stored, as they are, deep in bedrock (like, say, the vault of a bank).

3. Nor can Karl delete the copies of his email that are storied in other people's accounts. (When I was in the cubes, my manager kept five year's worth of email on their laptop. If I had "deleted" all my mail from my laptop, all her copies of it would still exist.)

4. Further, if I had dealings with Karl, I would be damn sure to cream off copies all the most incriminating email for myself, for protection in case the indictments came down.

5. Finally, it would be extremely interesting to know if the NSA, through its massive warrantless surveillance program, which included email, intercepted anything from gwb43.com. Or perhaps they, too, creamed some off?

So, the beauty part would be--correct me here if I'm wrong, lawyers--that not only would Karl be guilty of obstruction if he "deleted" mail from his own account, it wouldn't do him any good.

Has SmartTech been subpoenaed yet? (Assuming that they handle the RNC's Outlook servers?)

NOTE I have no clue how Blackberry servers work. It would be interesting, would it not, if they were located in Canada.

NOTE Don't be decieved by the "gosh, it's a lot of data" argument. Governments have gargantuan data storage and archiving requirements. For a government system, this amount of email should be trivial.