We've run a number of articles on email archiving for regulatory compliance. In "An interview with Roger Matus on email archiving and retrieval", Roger helped us understand some of the issues involved in making sure your organization's email is archived and can be found in the event of a legal situation.

In "An interview with Marie Patterson on email storage and retrieval", I had the opportunity to interview Marie Patterson, VP of AXS-One, a company that specializes in records management and compliance. While the topic of email storage and retrieval at first seems incredibly dry, once you read this interview, you'll be shocked at what could happen if you don't have good email storage and retrieval procedures in place.

What Ms. Perino's talking about is deleting messages in the user's own mail store, either in a local PST file or on an IMAP or Exchange Server. But even if a user deletes mail from the Deleted Items folder (the so-called "double-delete"), the archived email should still exist on the archive server.

Question: Is the White House operating a separate archive server or are they relying on each individual user to keep track of his or her email?

Obviously, if there's no archive server, then we've got a serious IT management problem. But, honestly, that's almost impossible to believe. Almost.

Archiving political email
But what about archiving political email? Does the White House have a rock-solid IT policy for protecting political email from high-level White House staffers? Uh, not so much.

It is our understanding that since 2004 the RNC has excluded White House staff with RNC email accounts from their automatic 30-day deletion policy, though the RNC did not disable the user's capacity to manually delete emails until recent weeks. If users didn't manually delete messages from their computers since that time, the messages should be accessible. However, we cannot be sure that all communications dating from 2004 are preserved and that issue is part of the review process

Please understand that I'm writing this in a politics-neutral way. So when you read what I'm about to paste from the Press Briefing, understand that I couldn't make this up. There's just no way that any right-thinking IT person (or any email user of even marginal experience) could possibly come up with this.

Go ahead. Smoke 'em if ya got 'em. You're going to need it.

Q What is new?

MS. PERINO: Well, we have -- it's clear, in regards to making sure people understand White House official business should be done on your White House official account. You should still endeavor to make sure that you don't have a Hatch Act violation. But one of the things that's new is that you have to -- if you err on the side of using a political email, that you would also archive that some way.

So you would either print it off, or you would forward it to another email, to your personal account -- I'm sorry, to your White House account, in some way keep that so that in the future, if the Counsel's Office needed to look back at those records, that they would have access to that. And in addition to that, I believe that individuals will just have to sign off that they got the policy and that they understand it, and that they will follow it.