We've found readers of both magazine to be wonderful, charming, and very knowledgeable, although we've also found some differences, as shown in Figure A.

FIGURE A


We just had to know. Roll over picture for a larger image.

In a totally on-target reader survey we did a few years ago, we found that 21% of OutlookPower readers prefer boxers to 45% who prefer briefs (with 21% liking "other"). By contrast, a whopping 37% of DominoPower readers prefer boxers while only 36% prefer briefs, leaving "other" to 27%. Apparently, a lot more DominoPower readers prefer the increased sperm count.

What can I say? We had to know.

Which brings us back to our discussion of White House email. Strangely, the abrupt transition from increased sperm count to our discussion of White House email somehow seems to work.

Migrating from Notes to Outlook
Interestingly, the White House's Dana Perino seems to confirm that email messages were lost, but she implies a different reasoning: a migration from Notes to Outlook that went bad.

Reading the April 13, 2007 Press Gaggle, Ms. Perino states:

Now, one of the things that occurred -- and we're also trying to figure out how many emails possibly could be sent by 1,700 employees on a daily basis. I don't know if the numbers are staggering. My inbox is staggering so -- we'll work to find that out. But there was a conversion sometime between 2002 and 2003 to convert people that were using Lotus Notes when we first arrived to Microsoft Outlook. And I know that the tech people worked to get us all transferred over. We had to save our Word documents and all to make sure that they weren't lost in that transition.

In this, she's talking about moving from Notes to Outlook sometime in 2002 or 2003. She then states:

...that some of the emails would have been inadvertently lost in a transition of conversion of a technical sort.

She then ends this part of the discussion with the following exchange:

Q Dana, can I follow up on that real quick. So this allegation about the 5 million missing emails refers only, as you understand it, to this 2002-2003 time period?

MS. PERINO: I don't know the time period. I'm saying 2002-2003 because that's when I worked at CEQ, and that's when I know that I got -- I moved from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Outlook. We'll get the dates for you. It was a rolling system in order to make sure that people weren't disrupted from their work.

CEQ is the Council on Economic Quality, part of the Executive Office of the President, where Ms. Perino was Communications Director.

So the real issue here is about migration. Could email messages have gotten lost in a migration from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Exchange?

Well, sure they could have. Again, we should never underestimate the ability for technology to go bad. And we should also never underestimate the ability for the government to hire the lowest bidder (except, I guess, for those no-bid contracts in Iraq, but that's not my editorial beat). So it is certainly possible for the people who did the migration for the White House to have screwed up.