NP: John Cage, 4'33" (extended dance mix)

Okay, so the Washington Post had a somewhat random followup to the whole White House "missing e-mail" scandal, and it actually got me thinking that there may be a legitimate explanation for what happened, because the way I have Microsoft Outlook hacked together on my work machine actually precludes a significant chunk of my e-mails getting backed up.

The way it happens is this: Say you want to organize your e-mails in folders. When you create a new folder in Outlook, you can either create it as an extension of your Inbox on the Exchange server, or you can create it in a "Personal Folders file," which lives somewhere else. In our environment, "My Documents" is actually a network folder that is consistently backed up. However, we've got size quotas on both our Exchange inbox and our My Documents folder.

So, if you want to avoid those size quotas, you put the Personal Folders file on your hard drive, which then doesn't get backed up by the system. And if you're a meticulous organizer who does a lot of e-mail volume, you may be inclined to essentially organize your e-mails into non-backed-up oblivion. And if all your e-mails on a certain day were on a certain subject, it's then more likely that they'd all be in that non-backed-up folder.

Do I think that's what really happened? No, not really. Mostly because you'd have to go out of your way to hack your Sent Items folder to get that off the Exchange server as well. But there's a hint of plausible deniability to the "we changed from Lotus to Exchange" defense.