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Some tidbits from the IG REPORT related to use of personal email accounts...

NOTE the date of this policy statement:

“On September 21, 2016, the Department issued a Policy Statement detailing the records retention policy for email communications. The Policy Statement contained the following guidance for the use of personal email accounts:
In general, DOJ email users should not create or send record emails or attachments using non-official email accounts. However, should exigent circumstances require the use of a personal account to conduct DOJ business, the DOJ email user must ensure that the communicated information is fully captured in a DOJ recordkeeping system within 20 days. If sending the email from a non-official account, the email user must copy his or her DOJ email address as a recipient. If receiving a DOJ business-related email on a non-official account, the DOJ email user must forward the business-related email to his or her DOJ email account. Once the user has ensured the capture of the email information in the DOJ account, the DOJ email should be removed from the non-official account.
See DOJ Policy Statement, Electronic Mail and Electronic Messaging Records Retention (approved on September 21, 2016).”

USE of personal email investigated:

“Comey
We identified numerous instances in which Comey used a personal email account (a Gmail account) to conduct FBI business. We cite five examples of such use in this section and include information provided by Comey and Rybicki about Comey’s use of a personal email account.
On November 8, 2016, Comey forwarded to his personal email account from his unclassified FBI account a proposed post-election message for all FBI employees that was entitled “Midyear thoughts.”
We asked Comey if he had any concerns about conducting FBI business on his personal laptop or personal email. Comey stated that he did not...

Strzok and Page
During our review, we identified several instances where Strzok used his personal email account for government business. Examples included an email chain forwarded to Strzok’s personal email account on December 10, 2016, discussing a draft congressional response, and draft versions of emails on his personal email account that Strzok eventually sent to other FBI employees using his government account. Most troubling, on October 29, 2016, Strzok forwarded from his FBI account to his personal email account an email about the proposed search warrant the Midyear team was seeking on the Weiner laptop. This email included a draft of the search warrant affidavit, which contained information from the Weiner investigation that appears to have been under seal at the time in the Southern District of New York and information obtained pursuant to a grand jury subpoena issued in the Eastern District of Virginia in the Midyear investigation.

Strzok told us that his understanding was that FBI policy discouraged the use of personal email and devices, but “there are allowances made” where “it is not practical or possible to use your [FBI] device.”218

218 We requested access to Strzok’s personal email account. Strzok agreed to produce copies of work-related emails in his personal account but declined to produce copies of his personal emails. Strzok subsequently told the OIG that he had reviewed the emails residing in his personal mailboxes and found no work-related communications. We determined that we lacked legal authority to obtain the contents of Strzok’s personal email account from his email provider, which requires an Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) search warrant to produce email contents.
In addition, although we learned that a non-FBI family member had access to Strzok’s personal email account in 2017, Strzok told the OIG that no one else had access to his personal email account during the period in question (i.e., late October 2016).

Page told us that references to these other forums reflected “mostly personal use” as opposed to using them for work purposes. However, she stated that she and Strzok sometimes used these forums for work-related discussions due to the technical limitations of FBI-issued phones. Page explained:
[I]n particular, the autocorrect function is the bane of literally every agent of the FBI’s existence because those of us who care about spelling and punctuation, which I realize is a nerdy thing to do, makes us crazy because it takes legitimate words that are spelled correctly and autocorrects them into gobbledygook. And so, it is not uncommon for either one of us to just either switch to our personal phones or, or in this case, where it was going to be a, a fairly substantive thing that he was writing, to just save ourselves the trouble of not doing it on our Samsungs. Because they are horrible and super-frustrating.
Page also noted that she and Strzok would often use personal email accounts to send news articles to one another.
We refer to the FBI the issue of whether Strzok’s use of personal email accounts violated FBI and Department policies. As noted above, Page left the Department on May 4, 2018.”

-Apparently we should all understand that they didn’t violate policy (in their opinion) because of electronic device limitations and we should also trust that they will save, delete and handle the records appropriately. I suppose it depends on how “exigent circumstances” are defined.