"Missing" or "Lost" Karl Rove of-the-RNC Emails

When I first heard about this a couple weeks ago, the politics of the situation were the most intriguing element of this story: Did Karl Rove, adviser to the President, try to subvert the Hatch Act, which provides for full accounting of all communications from, to and within the White House, by using his RNC-funded and maintained email for his secret, and potentially, illegal work as an employee of the American people?

For most people, that alone is intriguing. For me, though, I also liked the fact that this little debacle has brought to a more public light some little known facts:

• In cyberspace, there is almost always a server with something that's passed through it, with traces and back-ups of email.
• While email could certainly be completely lost (any NetAdmin will tell you that files can get corrupted, either in Microsoft Exchange Server or with any Linux flavor, and also be in between backup times...), it is pretty unlikely.
• The sender has to delete it from "sent items", then delete it from "deleted items"
• the receiver has to delete it from "received items", then delete it from "deleted items"
• the best practice in the IT industry is to create archive folders for a user to personally retrieve old emails, so most users actually just archive their email. So to delete it from there, you have to perform another delete action (that's three, so far!).
• Depending on the business, some backup servers also back up hard drives on user's workstations, so it would have to be deleted from there, as well.
• Then, on the server side, the typical time for data to reside on an email server is 30 days, but that is backed up every day, so theoretically, depending on the back-up practices of the company, you might have several years worth of backups on tape.
• Current practice due to Sarbanes-Oxley is to archive every month of data going back 7 years in "easily retrievable formats" which has been taken by many CIOs and IT Directors to be DVD-ROM discs, so any publicly traded company should have these at least back to 2004. Other companies are adopting these as best practices for IT and accounting purposes.
  
• The receiving server also keeps data at least for 30 days. Depending on the company practices of these backups, these might also exist.
• It is pretty easy to willfully delete emails if there is a strict policy of doing so on the sender's side, but not so easy on the receiver's side, so more than likely, copies of these emails could be retrieved. I've heard of IT departments of law firms charging approximately $2 per retrieved email as a standard cost, but I'm sure it could be more expensive depending on the above-mentioned standards implemented.

It is interesting that 35 years ago, tapes were erased by a secretive White House that did not want the Public (or even just Congress) to hear what it had said. If the RNC and Rove did their jobs well, and did indeed erase any of the evidence that illegal things were done in the Administrative Branch of the United States, then we might never be able to answer some of the questions about how we were led to war, what the political reasons were for firing state's attorneys, or what happened in the energy commission chaired by Cheney & Rove.

But I'm willing to bet that we CAN retrieve this information, that is, if it is legally allowable, because technology allows this capability.