So let's talk about email.
I was in a thread recently in which it was fairly obvious that people were looking to reporters and spokesmen from the administration as 'authoritative sources' on what is and isn't possible to do with email. The problem was, it was fairly obvious that nobody who works with computers was being consulted by either the reporters or the administration spokesmen. So how does email 'work'?
Computers do some pretty amazing things, and they do it by building tiny basic functions up into bigger, more complex functions. I'm going to skip a few layers of explanation that probably would only confuse most folks, and start midway up, at a point where what we think of as 'data' or 'files' are sort of 'readable' by humans, rather than talking about 1s and 0s and registers and gates and so on.
So what are some of the basic things computers do? They take input, like the mechanical key presses you do on your keyboard, they store it in various ways, they manipulate it, and they move it from place to place, sometimes within a single computer, sometimes handing it off to other devices. They also have clocks, and perform tasks at set times using those clocks, sometimes in millisecond increments, sometimes on human scales of hours or days or months. When you look at a screen, the image is refreshing constantly, more quickly than your eye can detect, at set intervals, with updated information if anything has changed.
Ok, that's all well and good, so what about email? Well, an email is just a stream of data that's been stored and formatted in a standard way, so that other programs can decide where it needs to 'go', and how to 'decode' it when it gets there. When I type into any email program, all I'm doing is giving a small processing program the basic message I want to send, and some of the information about who I am and who I want to send the email to and so on. That processing program then appends and prepends other bits of information to properly format my email, and then places it somewhere that another piece of code will find it, verify that it's properly formatted, and then move it on it's way. When it arrives at its destination, it's stored where the person who wants to read it can use another program to do so.
So far so good, right? Ok, now there are several ways to 'store' email. You can keep it in what's called a 'flat file', so that each email is a separate file in a folder somewhere, you can spool it together in a single (or several) big long file(s) along with other emails on the system (all of them, for a single 'user', or for some other combination of circumstances, depending on how your mail system works) or you can store it in a database. If a person knows where to look, and has the appropriate permissions in the system, they can actually go directly to that file and read it using any sort of text editor. (For the sake of simplicity, I'm not going to talk about extra layers of encryption here.)
In every case, though, that email exists in one or more files 'somewhere' until a command is issued to delete it, either manually, or by an automated scheduler. It might be on a central server, or it might be a local machine. But because it's really just another file or set of files in a directory on a machine, a small program (what is called a 'shell script') can be written to make copies of those files elsewhere, whether on the same machine or a different one. That script can be set to simply check the directories in which email is stored, look for any new activity since the last time anything was backed up, and copy anything new off to the 'archive' directory.
This isn't even really an 'email' function, although many email servers and programs have built in mirroring or archiving or whatever you want to call it. It's simply a basic functionality that exists in every major operating system, and is used all the time by the operating system itself for various other reasons. (An 'operating system' - windows, linux, unix, etc - is a set of programs that interact with each other to make the computer 'work'.)
So if some reporter is telling you that the government servers 'couldn't' back up email, the reality is that that reporter simply doesn't know enough about how computers work, and what can be done with a very simple script written by most competent programmers who understand a bit about scripting for their particular operating system. If some administration official is telling you 'it couldn't be done', they're actually telling you that they don't understand how computers work, and how they've worked ever since operating systems were first designed. You don't need to buy any 'extra software', although, again, most email software has such functionality already written into it anyway.
They're not 'lying' to you. They're just not talking about something they actually understand, and making incorrect assumptions about what 'can be done' by computers and programmers, and not actually talking to anyone who knows what they're talking about in IT. They might even have a basic understanding of computers, and just be assuming that unless the email programs have 'archiving functionality' built in, they "can't do it". But they're simply wrong, because any such back-up can be done at a much more basic level, external to any 'email program' or email server code.
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