A Congressional report released last week details how a series of mistakes early in the Bush administration resulted in an estimated 5 million emails failing to be archived.

The 24 page report into the Electronic Records Preservation at the White House reveals some shocking truths and highlights that the Whitehouse was in breach of the Presidential Records Act, which came into force after the Watergate Scandal and clearly states that presidential records belong to the citizens of the United States, not the president and his representatives.

When George W Bush came to power, it was decided to move the Whitehouse’s email server from IBM’s Lotus Notes to Microsoft’s Exchange. It was found that the Whitehouse’s incumbent archiving server, the Automatic Records Management System (ARMS), could not handle the data from the Exchange server.

After it was found that the ARMS system would not work with Microsoft Exchange, a decision was made to use Exchange Journaling to collect all emails to and from Whitehouse employees into an email folder from where they would be manually collected and saved to a .PST file. These .PST files were then distributed across a number of Whitehouse servers.

It also transpires that the archived email was stored on Whitehouse servers is such a way that historical email was accessible by all users of that server, regardless of their security clearance.

At Mimecast we come across even 10 user organisations that recognise that exporting messages to PST from Exchange Journals as inadequate.

• Discovery against distributed .PST files is difficult, first having to collate the disparate .PST files and then using the limited tools provided with Exchange and Outlook.
• .PST files become inefficient storage repositories over time and require a manual compaction - a time consuming process.
• If the .PST files are stored in insecure locations, which these certainly were, they can be tampered with or deleted.

Many organisations take Mimecast’s service to ensure continuity of email service while migrating from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Exchange, in fact this is exactly what global services company DTZ have done recently (here is the CNBC interview with DTZ’s CIO). If the Whitehouse had used a service like Mimecast, the would have immediately provided continuity for their email (according to the report, the migration took two years), as well as providing watertight email retention with strong chains-of-custody.

Many are hailing the loss of historical emails at a time where President Bush is increasingly under pressure as ‘convenient’, prudent use of an email archiving solution would have prevented the loss of the emails and put the President beyond suspicion.