This is such lying nonsense it is ridiculous to anyone who’s ever been in the I/T industry."
That is not necessarily true. I'm not %100 certain...but, if the IRS is using MS Exchange on the backend and Outlook 2008 or 2010 then it IS possible that emails are stored locally. Cached Exchange Mode (a default setting) will sync most if not all content in a users mailbox to C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Outlook\mailboxname.ost This file lets a user navigate and "use" their Outlook mailbox while offline, changes can be made (calendar appointments/unread status/build draft emails/create tasks/etc) and then those changes can then be propagated up to the server. If there was a catastrophic error on a local machine, data COULD be recovered from that file. We still never really got what the definition of "computer crash" is...an unbootable machine? a corrupt Windows install? HD errors? All these things can be construed as a "crash" in our dumbed-down, void of details culture.
But besides all that...I still don't understand why server side backups haven't been able to be found or restored.
Yes, I’ve worked a couple places where we had inbox quotas and archived old emails to our personal network drive or (if we had quotas on our network space) hard drives.
But the emails were also archived to tape. It was just a real pita to retrieve it from there.
What matters here are the NARA rules. If they were being followed then the emails should be stored on tape.