To be fair, there are talented technicians that can recover lost email messages from servers like ours, but without a good backup and a hard drive that physically shattered into dust, as shown in Figure A, even the best forensic technician wouldn't have been able to put us back together again.

FIGURE A


This is what the inside of the drive looked like. The platters were completely shattered. Roll over picture for a larger image.

So, sorry, Senator. Email messages can be lost.

Why this email thing is important
If you look at the political press, you'd think the only reason anyone wanted those missing emails was to dig through them to find something damning about the current administration and beat them up with it. And you'd probably be right.

It's really important to understand that, despite the politics, accurate email records are essential. They're important not just because the Presidential Records Act says they're important. They're important to those who sent the messages, in case they need to go back and refer to a message they might have sent or received. They're important to history, so we, as a society, can go back years or decades later to understand intent and to better understand our leadership.

Perhaps more than anything else, though, those email messages are important because we're going to have a new team in power in just a little under two years. The people in power then may need to go back through the records to see what was promised, what decisions were made, the reasoning behind decisions, the facts and observations used, and to apply all of that institutional knowledge to future decisions.

And whether the next president is a Republican or Democrat, that institutional knowledge will be absolutely necessary if we're still prosecuting former officials -- or prosecuting a war.

Diane Poremsky is the president of CDOLive LLC and a Microsoft Outlook MVP. She's author of Teach Yourself Outlook 2003 in 24 Hours (Sam's, 2003) and coauthor of OneNote 2003 for Windows (Visual QuickStart Guide). For questions or suggestions for future columns, write her at outlook@cdolive.com.