in info tech people always said the last place you wanted to work was for the government - because in government budgeting, money has to be spent on what its allocated for - which meant the technology was always far, far behind the private sector
the irs e/mail servers were probably very old technology - so that data is probably gone from the irs
it will still be on the recipient servers though
if the data is there how do we get it ?
There is NO WAY this high level Gov info just disappeared.
There is a chain of custody.
Hell They just told us the NSA has all of our emails cataloged.