I have emails that are ten years old because I use it as a filing system. However, they are not necessarily on your hard drive. That also depends on how it is set up. If you can go to a library or an internet cafe and access your emails from their computers, then obviously the emails are out in cyberspace on a server someplace rather than being on your hard drive.
Moreover, even if you take the precaution of keeping emails on a hard drive on your laptop, most email providers make backups for purposes of disaster recovery.
Beyond that, once you delete an email, it typically does not really disappear, it just goes into a different folder, usually called "archive". That itself is cleaned up (contents deleted) on a schedule that depends on your settings.
Also, whatever amount of disk space or other storage you have available for emails, it determines not so much the number of emails you can keep, but rather the total amount of space you can use expressed as a function of number of emails and size of each email -- roughly equal to number of emails times the average size of an email, if all your emails are around the same size (or normally distributed). So if you have, say, 148,000 million bytes of storage available (148GB as on this cheap Toshiba laptop I'm using), and you dedicate half of it to emails, you might as a ballpark estimate have 750,000 emails of 100,000 bytes each sitting on the hard drive on your laptop itself.
That would be adequate for text-only emails, but pictures take up more space, with large high resolution pictures taking up more space. Some systems have a limit on the size of any individual email, typically 5 million bytes, but many do not have any specific size limit. The mailbox itself typically has a limit, usually less than the 75,000 million bytes in the example, but again that depends on how it is set up. Presumably Mr Weiner stored a lot of photos, so he would have been able to store fewer total emails because of the relatively large space requirements of high resolution photos. Presumably his wife's emails would be more text-based and hence smaller.
If they used a govt-hosted email account then their emails would likely be held on a server someplace rather than on the hard drive on the laptop. It is risky to keep emails on a laptop hard drive because a laptop is so easily lost or stolen, and you would then need to request replacement copies from the backup or archival copies kept by your email service provider, if any.
So on balance, sure it's plausible they found as many emails as they said, and maybe the emails might have been held exclusively on the hard drive on the laptop. It seems unlikely they would do that, but who knows what Wiener would do; he's demonstrated amply that he doesn't exercise the best judgment. My best guess, though, is that there are probably no new Clinton emails there. But there could be.
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