Is it any wonder that White House administrations aren't looking for the best tools for archiving messages? If you're not sure you want email messages to come to light in a prewar build-up, migrate to a new email system. So, five million or so messages get lost. Big deal. Blame it on the migration to a new email system.

If you don't want all your political messages to be archived, just allow those in the Executive Office of the President to press Delete. Oops. Message gone.

And, if the fuss finally becomes too much, agree to revamp your email archiving methodology. Rather than using an archiving server, a technology expressly designed to solve this problem, you might choose to use the approach described by Deputy White House Press Secretary Dana Perino.

In April 2007, she suggested:

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.

Clearly, the White House is taking their email problems seriously.

Our next steps
As email professionals, we've been shocked by what we've discovered. As American citizens, we're deeply concerned by the implications.

This article completes our formal investigation into the missing White House emails. We've discovered that missing emails are the least of our concerns -- there are some freakly nightmare scenarios possible if current practice doesn't change.

In our next article, we'll discuss some of our recommendations for change, practices and approaches we think are absolutely essential to avoid breakdowns like we described earlier.

And, in our final article, we'll simply list all the questions, all the things we don't know the answers to. It seems fitting that we started this investigation with the question, "Where have all the emails gone?" and we end our investigation with even more questions.

Are you freaked out yet?

Dan Velasco is a Senior Technical Editor for WebSpherePower Magazine and DominoPower Magazine. He's a Sun Certified Java Programmer, Sun Certified Web Component Developer and an IBM Certified Solution Developer for WebSphere Studio V5.0. He's also a Principal CLP Application Developer (R4, R5 and ND6) as well as a CLP System Administrator (R4 and R5). You can reach him via email at dvelasco@webspherepower.com or on the Web at http://DanVelasco.com.