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White House Email Follies
Presto Vivace forwards a link detailing a recent House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform hearing on the White House missing emails mess. David Gewirtz's report, carried in OutlookPower and DominoPower (in 6 parts, keep clicking), makes for scary reading. "If, in fact, the bulk of the White House email records are now stored in bundles of rotting PST files, all at or above their maximum safe load-level, that ain't good in a very big way... I object to using the inaccurate and inflated claim of excessive cost as a reason to avoid compliance with the Presidential Records Act."
Look at this guy's record. He has a long history of driving companies out of business, or having them bailed out by others. Remember, this guy literally couldn't find oil in Bahrain. Then he promised to run the country like a corporation. If it weren't for this long history of incompetence, you could suggest that maybe he's intentionally trying to screw things up. But he does have that history. He's a chronic screw up and that's more than enough explanation. If others are using his incompetence to further their own agendas, well, that's also his fault for not riding rough shod over them. The sign on Truman's desk didn't say, "The buck stops down the hall."
Hic iacet Arthurus, rex quondam rexque futurus.
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This little problem can be overcome. Just get some image copies of those tapes out to the Internet Archive or Wikileaks, and all the technical problems will be quickly dealt with, the data will go on line, and it will all be indexed.
"It depends on what the meaning of 'is' is."
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
There is a completely acceptable reason for going through the RNC, and it's the same reason that the Clinton administration used similar services at the DNC: there are two competing acts. You've mentioned the Presidential Records Act, which is intended to protect the official records of the White House. There's also the Hatch Act, which (among other things) prevents government computers from being used for political activities. Emails regarding political activities went through the RNC servers (or, in the case of the Clinton Administration, the DNC servers); emails regarding activities as President, i.e. the Presidential Records, are supposed to go through the White House email system, where they are backed up and archived. So, you cannot infer an intent to violate the Presidential Records Act merely from the fact that outside services were used.
Treasonous? Ever heard of Sibel Edmonds? She's got your treason in detail. Do a Google or go here. And here's the Wikipedia entry.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
You can sign the tarball if you like afterwards.
Exchange server already does this, mail is pretty much stored in a database format.
It's a great new concept called "Single Copy Message Store" and it was done on email servers in the 80s and 90s. It's an absolute joke to implement with SQL tables. A halfway competent P programmer for P in {perl, python, php } could cobble a system like that together in a couple of days. !new
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Outlook has PST (Personal Store) and OST (Offline Store) files. PSTs are basically just local mail folder collections. OSTs are used to maintain local replicates of Exchange server mailboxes (so you can still use your email even if you're on the road). In Outlook 2003 "Cached Mode", Outlook also uses OSTs even when connected to the Exchange server, and synchronizes to the server in the background.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/208480
PST and OST files -- I'll call them "Outlook stores" -- are both built around the same file format. There are two variants. The original format, which Microsoft sometimes called "ANSI", is limited to 2 Gi byte total size, and 64 Ki items per table. The table limit affects the number of items you can have in a folder, as well as the total number of folders you can have in a PST. (Outlook stores from Outlook 97 and earlier also had a table limit of 16 Ki items, but could be auto-upgraded in place to large tables in newer Outlook versions.)
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/197430
These store limits affected OST and PST alike, so even if you had a nice, capable Exchange server, you could still encounter problems with Outlook store limits.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/288283
With Outlook 2003, Microsoft introduced a new Outlook store format. It's sometimes called the "Unicode" format. I'm aware of no documented limits on the file format. I'm sure there are some, but Microsoft doesn't document them. Microsoft didn't document the ANSI PST limits until long after they started causing data loss, either.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/830336
In versions of Outlook prior to 2002, if you exceeded the store format limits, Outlook would give no immediate indication. The file would keep getting bigger, as the software didn't have checks for the limits. But it would corrupting things, too. In short, silently loosing data.
Eventually, the Outlook store would get so damaged it would stop working. Microsoft provided a utility to truncate the file to 2 GiB to make it work again, loosing more data in the process.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/296088
In Outlook 2002, Microsoft added some code to check the limits of the store, and warn/stop if you reach them.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/305108
In Outlook 2003, along with the Unicode format, Microsoft added a parameter at which it would consider a Unicode store "full", even though the format can keep going. The stock limit is 20 GiB; you can increase it with a registry tweak.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/832925/
"ANSI PST" does not mean PST is a standard file format; that refers to the character sets/encodings the file uses.
Exchange Server uses an entirely different on-disk storage format, called EDB. There are technical limits, but they're insanely huge (16 TiB per store, 5 stores per database group). Exchange starts to run out of hardware resources (memory, mainly) long before you hit the file size limits. There are license-based size limits in some versions/editions of Exchange. 16 GiB in 2000 Standard, and 75 GiB in 2000 Standard SP2.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Exchange server already does this, mail is pretty much stored in a database format
Only while its on the server. Most sites only allow about two month's worth, at which point the user must delete it or save it to a "personal folder".
Table-ized A.I.
What really bothers me is that not this white house makes nixon and reagan look like boy scouts, but that the dems PROMISED to go after them, and really has done nothing.
Actually, some of them are trying, but the Bush regime has protected itself and is managing to block all attempts at going after them. Congressman Robert Wexler is working hard to bring them down. Check out www.WexlerForCongress.com.