If they are using outlook with exchange server, the mail is stored on the server and mirrored on the client. The mail servers are backed up nightly and copies of backups are kept all over the place. It is almost impossible to lose email.
Every laptop and desktop you own can burst into flames and the mail is still on the server and on backup tapes. If I delete all of the mail in my mailbox, it will be deleted from the server but it goes into a ‘dumpster’ on Exchange and can be undeleted for several days or weeks depending on the admin settings of the server. And if that doesn’t work, someone can get the backup tapes and restore it.
Why can’t they do a reverse search? That is the receipients of her e-mails?
I know they are claiming their hard drives also crashed but that is such BS-—the IRS has spent big tax dollars on their computer systems its almost impossible to fathom the totally lost e-mail claims.
It’s probably been stated a number of times in many threads on the Forum, but it bears repeating: Major corporations & large entities such as municipalities utilize Server Farms housing MANY redundant servers to store data… The hard drives connected to these servers are typically set up in what’s known as RAID configurations, where even the simultaneous crash of 25% (or more) drives on a server wouldn’t cause data access to skip a beat. With “Hot Swap” technology having been around for many years, server drives that do go bad can be replaced on the fly, without the end-user noticing anything.
Where I used to work, the Exchange e-mail system had redundant retention & recovery for messages “Deleted” for up to 2 weeks before being purged – this was on top of the regular server disk backups that were made to magtape and hermetically stored off-site. And my firm didn’t approach the size of your average city in terms of #/employees or annual budget…