Simple, personal proof: could you, if required by a court of law, produce every E-mail message you received on February 18, 2003? Including spam? I couldn't. I didn't keep the messages I considered spam, I didn't keep copies, and my server doesn't keep copies for that long. I keep backups, but not going back that far for either personal E-mail or for the servers. Chances are pretty good you don't either.

Most E-mail clients are set to delete messages from the server either after they're read or after a few days, especially if the account is only read from one computer. Person A sends E-mail to Person B without having his E-mail client configured to save a copy of his outgoing mail, so Person A has no copy. Person B reads the message and has his E-mail client delete it from the server as he does, as most people do, so the server no longer has a copy. Person B then deletes the message himself, so Person B doesn't have a copy.

Now, except in the "sometimes you can recovere deleted files" sense, the message is gone. Neither A nor B nor the server in-between would normally save a copy of it. Don't get suckered in on this, don't waste time on the "they must exist" thing. They may be gone.

By the way, on a hunch, I just took a look at the administrative options for an account on the E-mail server I've been running for about 7 years. There's an option not to leave mail on the server for each account [that is, to automatically delete it when it's read whether the client asked for it or not], and a quota limit to refuse new messages if the user is taking up more than a given amount of storage space, but there is no similar option to disallow deleting. There is a "filter" plug-in I could add onto the server to archive copies of E-mail messages, but then it would archive every single message on the server - every client, every domain.

Chances are pretty good that the RNC's E-mail server is also shared by dozens of other clients at the same hosting company, and archiving millions of messages per day is not something they'd normally do; they'd fill up a new 500GB hard drive once or twice a month at minimum. Again, that's why the Presidential Records Act is so clear that the White House has to do this - it's not the normal way E-mail is processed.

Senator Leahy is partly right - he should investigate and subpoena every possible place they could be, from forensic data recovery on Karl Rove's laptop to backups at the mail provider, forensic data recovery at the mail provider, whatever can be found. But you've got to treat E-mail like an answering machine message that was "deleted" - there's a decent chance the message won't be 100% recoverable, especially messages going back months or years on the same tape (server, whatever).

This is not "give up all hope," this is "let's have expectations based on the reality of electronic communications." We're supposed to be the reality-based community, right?

But some of what I said last night? TPM and others are getting the same thing today. The RNC's E-mail provider routinely purged E-mails every 30 days? Why? Did the RNC ask for this, or is it something the hosting company does for all of its customers instead of imposing storage quotas or other limits on their use of the shared server? And in 2004, the contract was changed to stop that - why? And users of the server still continued to delete their own E-mails - why? Were they not told it was a violation of the Presidential Records Act? If they were and continued to delete messages, isn't that at least "attempted obstruction of justice?"

We have to look for the E-mails, tenaciously, but we can't assume they must still exist somewhere. They may or may not, which doesn't mean "don't look." But there was pretty clearly some attempt in 2004 to keep such messages from being deleted and now we're being told they were deleted anyway. Why? What can we prove and how fast can we prove it?

--Matt

It was late, I was drinking, and I'd just got through reading the whole bottom half of the dKos diary linked to in that post, which seemed to be one person after another (many with remarkably high User ID numbers, i.e. recent joiners) saying "no no nonononono, they wouldn't have kept the emails, it's a waste of time to try, this is a red herring, go look somewhere else [with no particular suggestion as to where]" etc. So getting here and seeing what looked like more of the same I rather went off.

Yes of course we all realize they may for once in their fumble-fingered lives managed to do something technically right and tried to delete everything. But the fact is that such discussions are at least one step ahead of what we're trying to do here, which is push, pull, shove, kick, strap rockets to the ass of, and otherwise get the story out in the first place.

And with as little techno-geek-speak as possible so it can be understood by Regular Folks. This is not, swear to God, intended as a "stupid sheeple people" remark: it's the difference between launching into an explanation of the whole oil extraction, refining and delivery system... and pointing out to somebody that "Hey, friend your gas gauge is pointing to E, ya think we oughtta do something about that?"

Anyway, consider an apology extended and the tr*ll thingy redacted in its entirety. :)

...is that emails are recoverable. I am particularly aware of this because I have been dealing with an associated firm involved in backdating of stock options, and every email sent from their computers had to be un-deleted. The feat was accomplished.

Ruth

My experience with corporate email is exactly the same as yours. The business couldn't run if email weren't recoverable.

I agree with mattd that if email were stored on the server forever, the server would fill up. That's why the mail is compressed and moved to an offline archive, whether CD or tape. That's the way things work at scale.

Notably, all the Republican talking points have to do with people's personal experience of email: "Look, I right-clicked." And as we all know, authoritarians can't look at the world through a systems perspective (see Dean's Conservatives without Conscience) so that's not surprising. And mattd's experience of his own server is interesting, but not relevant, again, at scale.

So, unless the administration is to government as Enron is to corporations -- snicker -- the email is stored.

And I note also that nobody's mentioning the possibility that the RNC server vendor is archiving mail for its own purposes. All thieves want to be able to blackmail each other. Eh?

No authoritarians were tortured in the writing of this post.