I actually spent an entire day reading US v Libby Legal Proceedings from the Office of Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald because one of those sources claimed a link between the proceedings and the missing emails. I could find no such link and my day (and my patience) was shot.

This is the crux of the problem for anyone attempting non-biased research.

Nearly all the fuss about the missing email messages comes from an entity with some political aim or another -- immediately rendering those claims suspect. Since we're not looking at this from a political angle, but really from a technical approach, we can't use any of those sources. It's crazy. Some of the sources these sites are claiming as "truth" are completely unverifiable. One political organization (I'm not going to name it here) claims the source of its claims are from leaked documents within the White House. It might be true, but we can't verify it. And, it stinks of politics.

Reading the White House Press Briefings
We've decided to pull our data straight from the White House press briefings. Before many of you go off and claim that these are anything but unbiased, understand we know that.

Press briefings by any president's staff are designed to create specific impressions. However, it's reasonable to assume that anything positive claimed by a press briefing reflects the most positive possible marketing message while any mistake discussed in a press briefing reflects the mistake in the best possible light.

So, if the President's press secretary says email messages are missing, we can be sure that email messages are missing. What we can't be sure of is how many and just how bad the situation is. Given my skeptical nature, I've got to assume that if the President's office claims there are email messages missing, in reality, there's a lot of email messages missing.

After all, one needs only to look at "I did not have sexual relations with that woman" and "Mission Accomplished" to see that presidents tweak the truth for their own advantage.

The net of this is that by looking at the White House's own press briefings, we can get some anthropological indication of what we're dealing with, but certainly not the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

Missing White House emails
Deputy Press Secretary Dana Perino does confirm that some messages were "potentially lost" in her April 12, 2007 Press Briefing:

We are trying to understand to the best of our ability the universe of the emails that were potentially lost, and we are taking steps to make sure that we use the forensics that are available to retrieve any of those that are lost. And we've changed the policy so that we can make sure that this doesn't happen again.

Question: What email messages are we talking about? Are we talking about email messages sent through the White House EOP.GOV accounts or the messages sent through the RNC-operated GWB43.COM accounts?