Now, instead of that dog-ate-my-homework claim, the excuse is that the IRS only wants to make sure there are no duplicates in the bunch, a peculiar fastidiousness given how the agency has stopped answering most taxpayer phone calls . BS. Myself or any other competent programmer can write a little program to find/remove duplicates in under 1 hr, (*) and run it across a few thousand emails in a few minutes or less. Besides, who the {expletive} cares if there are dupes, just release the {expletive} info you lying {expletives}. Hold them in contempt (I certainly do) and throw them in jail.
(*) Not making that up. I actually wrote a similar program to scan through digital images on our home file server. We take lots of pics, and admittedly don't always organize them as well as we should. My program looks for duplicates by reading in the raw bytes of the image (.jpg, .png, etc), generating an MD5 hash, and then storing the hash and pathname to the file in an internal data structure. (a map keyed on that hash value) When it finds a duplicate hash it is a pretty good bet that it isn't an accidental collision. It prints out the duplicate paths and moves one copy to a folder to be deleted. If for any reason I think they are not duplicates I can move them back.