I think there will always be matter that we won’t be privy to from the government – perhaps communications that would fracture strategic relationships.

Anyhow, if I was the next President, I’d be pretty pissed that this necessary narrative of the administration was missing.

I hope our current culture would leave the world a better place than it is now, and part of that means preserving important information (and important is relevant) about who we were, what we did, why we did it and what it meant for us… White House email certainly falls into that category.

We know what we have seen, but we don’t know what we haven’t seen.

UHHH… YEAH.

Email is the notebook of our generation. Imagine not having John Adam’s correspondence or the Federalist Papers (basically letters) to help reconstruct how we arrived at our Constitution??

Or not having Lincoln’s or Jefferson Davis’ notebooks from 1861 to help reconstruct and understand the motives behind the Civil War?

Sure, email is less “permanent” than paper in our mind, but we’re creating a huge information gap for future historians if we don’t treat it with some notion of posterity (especially the emails pertaining to national interests during a period of world history so crucial as our own times).

I think they should have been preserved for the eyes that have clearance.

I can’t imagine how the federal government would treat a public corporation that failed to maintain required records.

I agree that the White House email thing is problematic, but I don’t think it is so surprising that they scrapped the system from the Clinton administration.

Are you using many versions of software from 2000 or before?