Reply #2: I'm not sure, but aren't those two separate things? [View All]

[Igel]

Rove deleted e-mails.

5 million e-mails estimated to not have been preserved by the WH e-mail system.

The latter isn't hard to figure out. "Reply to all" and e-mail lists are scourges.

Before finals last fall the teacher in an Arabic class I took sent out 5 or 6 e-mails over the course of a week, dealing with presentations and the final. Each e-mail had maybe 10 responses, and a couple scored 15 responses. Assume 5 and 10. That's 50 e-mails, each sent to 20 people. 1k e-mails. Now, try the DoJ, with over a hundred employees relying on e-mail, many of them sending things to everybody involved in project. 5 million e-mails received over 18 months? Not a problem.

Let's do the math: 5 million e-mails, 18 months. 28000 or so per month. Assume 21 days at work: 1330 or so per day. Let's low-ball the number of people sending e-mail, say it's 50. Down to 27 a day. Consider that many of those would have multiple recipients ...

In fact, the number "lost" was probably reconstructed by looking at the weekly average for similar months and doing a bit of arithmetic.