Perhaps Perino's comment here will shed some light on the question:

That is true at the White House for EOP accounts. I can't speak to any other organization, or their policies, although we are trying to work with the RNC to understand their policy.

So far, the White House has acknowledged that some messages may be missing from government-run servers. But there's no specific detail on whether the political email has been archived, is missing, or what.

But then we hit an interesting "whoops" in the road. According to Perino, apparently the RNC emails were deleted every 30 days up until 2004!

As I said, anyone with those emails here, as I understand it, since 2004, those emails have been separated from an RNC policy which is to automatically delete every 30 days deleted emails. So we have worked to try to be both in coordination and compliance with the Hatch Act, as well as the Presidential Records Act.

There is no way this isn't going to be painful to wrap your head around. Further in Perino's briefing, she discusses an issue of "double-deleting". It's just easier if I let her tell you about it:

Q How does that square with what Scott Stanzel was saying this morning, where he was saying that staffers could, so-called, double-delete?

MS. PERINO: That is true. When I say that we're trying to find if there were any potential emails that were not captured in that system, if someone had the capability to -- if they wanted to clean out their inbox -- delete a message, and then when your inbox -- when your deleted box fills up, and you decide that you want to clean that up, if you delete that one, as well, where did those emails go? And that's exactly what we're trying to find out.

Q A couple minutes ago you were saying that for sure since 2004 it's been archived, though. But I'm trying to understand, with the double-delete, can that override the archiving?

MS. PERINO: I think that it might be able to. And I can't speak to any individual's personal email habits, but let me -- I'm not a technical expert, so let me make sure we find that.

Q If it could override it, then what you said earlier about it's archived since 2004 may not be true, because it could be double-delete -- some of the emails could be --

MS. PERINO: Let me look into the specific technical pieces of that.

Unfortunately, the White House briefing transcripts don't record who's asking the questions. But at least we're seeing Ms. Perino's answers. And, if I'm reading this correctly, she's saying emails might be archived, and if they're archived, they could be deleted later, if someone deletes mail from his or her Deleted Items folder.

Best practice archiving and the Deleted Items folder
Let's dive into this for a moment. If you're going to use best-practices to set up an email archiving solution, the solution would grab email messages as they transit the server.

Anything going in or out through the SMTP server would be archived to a central hard drive, which, every so often, should be backed up. There should be no way for a user on the network to delete or "double-delete" a message that exists on the archive server. In fact, there should be no way for a user to have any access whatsoever on the archive server.