Reply #3: Of course there are backups

[notadmblnd]

and the costs of backups and restores are in every SLA the government signs with an IT contractor. They are on tape, probably at an off site data storage facility. They need to work backwards starting with the yearlies. The retention on the yearly backups are probably no less than seven years. It's been my experience that people don't clean up their e-mail very often in the corporate world. They like to keep a paper trail in order to cover their asses (I know I did). I will admit, looking for one particular e-mail to restore can be like looking for a needle in a haystack, but a mass restore of all e-mails they've backed up should be no problem. Now, they need to set up a rack of servers, pull the tapes and start the restore process so these e-mails can be gone through by the authorities.