Issues of apparent authority
It is often recommended that companies allow individuals to use their own email accounts for personal mail. Web-based email services like Google's Gmail, Microsoft's MSN Mail, and Yahoo! Mail allow employees to conduct private matters without involving the business. For example, there is no reason why a company should know about an individual's family matters, personal habits, medical appointments, or financial affairs.

Even further is the legal concept of "apparent authority." An email that comes from your organization's domain may appear to be written on behalf of the organization. A person who would never think of writing a letter on corporate letterhead to a financial institution for a personal matter might not even think twice about using a corporate email account for the same content.

The 20 or so White House staffers may have had excellent reasons for keeping political mail separate from official government mail because of "apparent authority". For example, it is more appropriate for a partisan email to come from RNCHQ.ORG than WHITEHOUSE.GOV. An interpretation of the Hatch Act would suggest that partisan use of government systems is also illegal.

The problem comes when official mail is sent from a personal email account. What happens when those messages are not part of the corporate archive? In the case of the White House staffers, the appearance is not great. Here are some excerpts from emails that were not in the White House system:

• "I now have an RNC blackberry which you can use to email me any time. No security issues like my WH (White House) email", wrote Susan Ralston, Karl Rove's former executive assistant, to two lobbyists working for Rove on July 11, 2001.

• "...I can access my AOL email when necessary so if you need to send me something that I need to read, you can send to my AOL email and then call and page me to check," wrote Ralston to Jack Abramoff himself.

Of course, the White House employees have the requirements of the Presidential Records Act (PRA) of 1978, which states that all Presidential Records belong to the United States government. If government records were destroyed intentionally, additional problems may arise.

For other organizations, the appearance of bypassing corporate archiving systems may cause a problem in the court of public opinion, if not a court of law. The problem is compounded if such emails become public, like the two excerpts displayed above, before corporate IT and legal are aware of them. Remember that emails may never be truly lost when one remembers that while a sender may delete an email, the receiver also has a copy.

What's a company to do?
A company must first decide whether to allow the personal use of corporate systems. While this is not an alternative for partisan email on White House systems due to the Hatch Act, it is a safe approach from an archival perspective. Every message is kept. The downside is the additional resources required for personal mail and the "apparent authority" of corporate systems.