E-Mail: Why It's Next to Impossible to Lose

Putting politics aside in the brewing White House e-mail scandal, the real question is: Can e-mail really get lost these days?

The answer, of course, is yes, but in most instances it would require a perfect storm.

"For e-mail to be lost it needs to be deleted by the sender and the recipient, neither can have archiving software and the backup tapes must be destroyed," says Paul D'Arcy, vice president of marketing for MessageOne , which develops e-mail management, business continuity and disaster recovery software.

E-mail can be lost due to accidental corruption of e-mail stores or backup tapes, or deleted based on some established e-mail management policy, but the fact remains that those foibles or policies would have to be present on both the sender and the receiver side to ensure that e-mail is permanently lost.

Of course, some experts point out that if the sender and recipient are on the same e-mail system both copies could be lost in any system corruption or purge of backup tapes.

"So lost means it no longer exists or it exists on some very, very hard-to-find place such as a backup tape but you have no idea where it is," D'Arcy says.

But D'Arcy adds that some organizations with a process of rewriting backup tapes on short intervals of a month or two and with no archiving in place could easily and permanently eliminate e-mails. "But again, a likely place those e-mails may reside is on the recipient side."

Lost or Missing E-Mail

A better word than "lost" might be "missing," which is a word that is now starting to creep into explanations as to the whereabouts of millions of e-mails sent by White House officials even though the White House admitted last Thursday that it has a policy to retain forever e-mails sent by someone with a White House e-mail address.

Another way e-mails go "missing" is because users turn to private e-mail accounts to find a way around the corporate e-mail system out of necessity, such as during a server crash, or to escape record-keeping policies.

A study released this month by Osterman Research shows that when the corporate e-mail system goes down, 60% of employees use a personal e-mail account to conduct business communications. The study includes interviews with 432 employees from midsize and large U.S. businesses.

A third of respondents say they used personal e-mail accounts at least once or twice a week for business purposes, and 17% say they do so every day.

Those are e-mails "lost" on the sender's side of the equation because they are outside the corporate e-mail management system.

In the White House case, officials admitted to using e-mail accounts issued by the Republican National Committee (RNC) for some correspondence.

Part of the reason for that, however, is mandated by the Hatch Act, which bars White House employees from using taxpayer-funded resources, such as e-mail services, for partisan activities.

But while the RNC admits to having archives, it reportedly did not have a policy to archive all the e-mail accounts issued to White House officials, which could contribute to "lost' e-mail.