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These people are so stupid. They are playing to the low-information crowd. Anyone who knows anything about emails would be able to put together the fact that if you can access your email account from more than one machine, the emails do not exist only on one machine. I use dozens of different computers during the day, and several at home. I can get my work email on any of my home computers and my phone. I can access my work email from anywhere on the campus, on one any of 600 computers. I have emails in the waste basket that go back six or seven years, and they are available on every computer.

My work email backs up every single email I ever send or receive, regardless of whether it is spam or anything useful. They archive every message that passes through the server just in case someone wants to sue someone else. If I were to say “nice dress” to a female employee, they could get every single email I had ever sent or received and produce them to her lawyer, in less than a week. If they didn’t take time to think about it or route the request through multiple departments, the could get them in a few hours.

What we are getting here is a refusal of the Powers That Be to actually address the issue. When you have people saying her hard drive was destroyed and that is why we can’t get her emails, they are lying. THEY ARE LYING! L-Y-I-N-G! The Congressmen on the committee just sit there and say well OK then, but they know better. They want to make it go away while looking like they are doing something about it. And 70% of the people that are watching actually believe this because they are technologically inept.

Anyone who knows anything about emails would be able to put together the fact that if you can access your email account from more than one machine

Not necessarily. It is very VERY low tech and inconceivable for an organization like the IRS to have such a policy. But you CAN have your emails delivered to a personal folders file (PST) that resides on your local hard drive. You can also elect to have the original removed from the server.

POP3 is a good example of this. You can specify your POP3 to download an email and remove the original from the server. You can even specify to leave the email up on the server for 30 days or other timeframe and then permanently remove it.

All this was originally a way to manage mailbox size quotas that can be configured in Microsoft Exchange. The IRS is claiming that their quota was set at an extremely low size. This would force their users to get warnings when their mailbox was approaching it's maximum size. They are then presented with an option to download the email to their local machine.

People in this situation could hypothetically download (or archive) their email that is over 30 days old to a local hard drive and leave the newer ones up on the server which would remain accessible via the web, pda, or other computer.

Outlook comes with an auto-archive function that can be set up to do this. You could conceivably be removing email from the server and barely even notice it.

Even if you grant the IRS the benefit of the doubt. Somebody in Lerner's position should certainly have an external USB drive (maybe $150) that would create a local backup of her hard drive. An organization of this stature with a policy of permanently removing emails from the main server should certainly provide their users (at least key users) with a means to automatically backup. Under this sort of policy, the most email she could have lost would be a week if her local backup was set to occur weekly.

Now, if you grant the IRS the benefit of the doubt on THAT one. You can also claim that a vast majority of failed hard drives have data that is recoverable by either in-house software or by a data recovery center. I have experienced a couple of hard drive crashes. For most, I can recover data on site. For the rest (like a hard drive that makes a loud clicking noise), the drive can be shipped off to a data recovery center where the platter is removed and the data is recovered block by block to an external usb drive. Total cost is about $1800. I have never had a hard drive come back with a 0% recovery rate. I believe, the IRS didn't even try this route.

Finally, if you grant the IRS the benefit of the doubt on that one, you still have the issue with the odds of people who correspond with one another all experiencing hard drive crashes. The IRS claims by industry standards, a certain percentage of drives fail a year. They claim that this equates to thousands of drive failures at the IRS alone. But the odds of them happening so closely would be astronomical. Let's say somebody wins the powerball every week. So you average about 50 winners a year. Imagine if 10 of those winners came from the exact same gas station. What are the odds of that? Those are the kinds of odds the IRS is trying to get away with here. THAT is the issue the media is playing off to the low-information crowd.

When every single step here is combined, while technically possible, the odds of it occurring reach impossible heights. This is a coverup, pure and simple.