Dumb computer questions about the emails.

[pnwmom]

How quickly could a search be conducted of, say, 10K emails to determine how many were duplicates of emails they've already read?

How quickly could a search be made of the address field, to pull out only those that went to or from Hillary? (I'm guessing a minute on this one.)

[asiliveandbreathe]

1. After reading the article from Crooks and Liars - it doesn't make sense...none of t!

http://crooksandliars.com/2016/10/disagreeing-newsweeks-eichenwald-comeys

[Takket]

2. i see where you trying to go but...

regardless of the answer, there will be no info given until after the election day. that uncertainty is valuable to Trump and that is why it will remain.

[andym]

3. A few minutes. nt.

[MyNameIsKhan]

4. One can write scripts quickly and run them to see if a mis-match is found, all they need is SW Eng

[getagrip_already]

5. minutes on the address fields.......

Finding unique emails could also be quick once the load them into a database.

Finding duplicates is easy if you do it right. If there are a large number of unique emails, it will be a slog to sort them and look for subjects that could be sensitive.

[NoGoodNamesLeft]

6. It would not even require any search to find out if the mails are copies of what they already saw

If the email account's incoming server is IMAP and they have already seen the contents of that account on another device then there is 0% chance there is something they have not already seen on the new device....0% chance.

You can test it out yourself if you have an iPhone and set up a Yahoo.com account on it. Send some emails to the address and open them on your phone. Then go to yahoo.com and sign into the email account and delete all the emails. Then go close out of mail and then re-open it and your emails you deleted will be gone from the phone too. Then forward something to the yahoo mail and open it at yahoo.com and then go check your phone mail, it will be there too. Just looking at the email configuration on the laptop will tell them if these are all old mails.

[pnwmom]

8. So, are you saying that if the devices are connected,

then all the emails will be duplicates?

So if any of the emails are the same, then they all are?

[NoGoodNamesLeft]

13. Most likely, yes...IF the email account's incoming server is IMAP

There are two types of email accounts...IMAP and POP. Most accounts today are IMAP because people use multiple devices. POP accounts will only send your new email to the first device that connects to the server. In POP accounts the emails ONLY live on the device they were opened. This is terribly inconvenient in today's high tech environment.

So this leaves IMAP email. This type of account has ALL email messages living on the server. For IMAP accounts whatever exists on the server exists EXACTLY the same across ALL devices...no exceptions. If you delete one of those emails they go poof across all devices. So, for the FBI to know if these mails are duplicates or not all they have to do is find out whether the account is configured as IMAP or POP and you can do this in the account settings right on the device. Heck, some types of accounts can ONLY use IMAP and you can check their default configuration at this website: https://www.apple.com/support/mail-settings-lookup/
One of Huma's email accounts in question was a yahoo.com email. Yahoo accounts by default are set up as IMAP. So at least those yahoo.com emails...those are all duplicates unless she went in and changed the configurations on purpose to make it so she didn't get her email on all her devices, which is highly unlikely.

[semby2]

7. Don't know

This guy says a few days:

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/just-a-few-days

But I don't know if we have enough information to make a judgement.

Comey doesn't give a shit about trying to resolve it quickly. He wants the cloud of suspicion out there for months.

[LisaL]

9. Comey claims he doesn't even have the emails. He still has to obtain them.

[BlueStateLib]

10. It would take me a couple hours to write and test a winbatch script that would do the sorting

I think I could do 200 - 400 pages an hour

[Jarqui]

11. It probably would not take long to get a good handle on them

Without actually seeing what they have, then I'd allow a small percentage chance that there would be an issue that would slow one down. But, it's really unlikely.

There are a number of ways to go about it. The FBI would already know because they've very, very likely ported Hillary's emails into a searchable database and in doing so split out subject, to, from, copy, message text, attachments, etc. So they have people well versed in this.

Under the hood, there is stuff in the header of the email that could help - look at an email of yours clicking "properties" => "details". String extracts can populate a database with that header info to help pin down duplicates. There are a number of other ways. It's just data and the reason you can print it or read it is because the data in the email can be logically extracted by software. This is not rocket science - high school kids could do this.

At the end, you probably might have a handful of inconclusive ones to manually go through. But you'd get through the bulk of them pretty darn quickly to identify if they're new to the FBI database of Clinton emails or not.

The problem is if you get several thousand new ones, there's no way they can come up with a quick answer. If they get a handful or less than 1% new, then it's not going to take long to chew through the balance to verify classification issues, etc.

But they should be able to have answer to the first part "how many are new emails?" pretty quickly given the stakes.

[pnwmom]

12. Thanks, Jarqui. My guess is that they're all duplicates, and there's no way

she has several thousand emails on this device that have never been seen before.

But we'll probably find out in a year or two.

[Jarqui]

14. Given half her emails got deleted, I wouldn't expect 100% duplicates

but I'll bet a lot of them are and I have my doubts anything sinister they didn't already know in general
(stated by someone who was critical of Hillary's handling of the emails to the bitter end)

[HipChick]

15. About 3 secs...use X1..software can search mail databases for duplicate email..

I get anything from 3K-6K emails per day....without X1 I would never find anything..