How much email are we talking about?
Apparently, the White House manages a "massive number" of email messages any year. In the April 16 Press Briefing Deputy Press Secretary Dana Perino described the numbers:

And, remember, there's a huge amount of email that comes in and out of the White House. And it's quite a feat for the IT folks to be able to keep up with software upgrades and storage and the amount of -- just the amount of traffic that's coming in and out on emails. On any given year, I think I've read upwards of 50 million emails are sent and received, not to mention forwarded or copied or blind copied, or all of those different features that you can use with email. So it's a massive number.

Hah! Those folks are lightweights.

Here at ZATZ, we send and receive more than 54 million email messages each year, well over a million a week. We have a lot of subscribers. We manage 4 million more email messages a year than the White House and we don't have the full resources of the United States government at our disposal. Basically, we've got me. 'Course I'm good. I'm very, very good.

The claim, however, is that there are close to 5 million email messages missing. In that same Press Briefing, Ms. Perino stated:

I don't have a specific number for you. Again, I wouldn't rule out that there were a potential 5 million emails lost, but we'll see if we can get to you. If it was 5 million, I think that, again, out of 1,700 people using email every day, again, there was no intent to have lost them.

She also said:

We're not talking about GWB emails, but within the EOP system, that there had been a gap or that there had been upwards of 5 million emails that were missing. Scott and I are looking into that; we're talking to the Office of Administration.

Scott, in this case, is Scott Stanzel, another Deputy Press Secretary at the White House.

It's important to be clear when reading these statements that, at no time, does the White House explicitly confirm that messages are missing. If you read the transcripts carefully, you'll see these statements are in response to assertions by outside political groups. Thusfar, however, the White House has neither confirmed nor denied that a large amount of messages subject to the Presidential Records Act are actually missing. In fact, we may never know.

It's very difficult nailing down the truth, or even finding a breadcrumb path to the truth, especially since there's so much distortion in the media. My wife Denise and I enjoy watching the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, which we did on April 16, the night when these Press Briefings took place.

On the show, Stewart showed a clip of Perino saying "I wouldn't rule out that there were a potential 5 million emails lost" and then a few seconds later, after editorializing on the amount 5 million, he aired a clip showing her saying:

Well, I will admit it, we screwed up and we're trying to fix it.