Replies

This would mean....for these emails to be missing...both environments would have been required to crash....and...email would be missing for more than 6 or 7 persons.

Unless their email policy never followed federal regulations and laws in the first place. If you assumed they were telling the truth, it didn't and it still isn't.

I heard that they are claiming that their policy at the time was to only allow 150MB of email to be stored in the server account. This is a woefully small amount even in 1990's standards.

As a mail admin, if you set mailbox size limitations, the user is warned and presented with an option to download their email from the server into a personal folder file (in Outlook this is a PST). At that time, the email is completely gone from the server and all subsequent network backups.

When I rarely make my user archive emails (some folks at my company have 10-15 gigabytes of email), I set it up so that the PST file is stored in a network location. This way, even though the email isn't saved in an email server backup, it is saved in my regular network file backup. The network drives are also redundant so if one drive crashes, others take over until a new one can be "hot swapped" back in. I may also store a copy of the PST file on a flashdrive.

Based on what the IRS is claiming, I would assume THEY forced Lerner to archive the email to her local computer (either laptop or desktop) which probably ran off of a single hard drive with no redundancy. To make matters worse, they appear to have had no individual backup procedure in place for individual client workstations. Any company that forces their users to rely on their workstation hard drive, should at least provide their users with a flash drive or external drive that would accommodate weekly backups. If this were the case, I'd schedule an individual backup for a specific day of the week and instruct the user that they need to leave their computer in their office during this scheduled time.

Now if they retained really old backups (which they claim they haven't), they could theoretically restore the mailbox BEFORE it was archived to the server. This would be tricky because with 150MB of storage, she could have been pulling her email off the server regularly and frequently making it virtually impossible to reliably restore from a backup.

When her hard drive crashed, she was informed that the data couldn't be recovered. I find it hard to believe. I've experienced several. If the data is considered valuable enough, you can send the drive to a recovery company where it is disassembled in a cleanroom environment. The data is then transferred to an external USB drive. Cost is about $1800. It is VERY expensive (at least to my small company), but recovery is normally at least 90-95% effective. You'd literally have to smash the hard drive with a hammer to get a 0% recovery IMHO.

We're also talking about a government with the capability to search scrubbed hard drives for things like child-porn and other illegal activities. I find it inconceivable that they could just toss away the hard drive of somebody in that position and accept a 0% data recovery. If this happened to the owner of MY company, you'd bet the $1800 would be spent and SOMETHING would be recovered.

Their story is almost certainly a lie. However, if it were taken as truth, the IRS has failed to conform to legal requirements for data storage and management. And they continue to do so. Lots of heads should roll and their probably shouldn't be an IT worker left at the agency when they're done. Not to mention the possibility of criminal charges for failing to comply with government regulations on data retention that they see fit to impose upon the private sector.

If they are telling the truth, then all relevant agencies and the democrat party should have THEIR email servers subpoenaed and searched for all mail sent from or sent to Lois Lerner and her close associates. And all of those agencies should have their data retention policies scrutinized as well.

Sorry about the marathon post.