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."

Comments

To quote Artie Bucco from The Sopranos

[Ron_Fitzgerald]

"We lead the world in computerized data collection"

To hear that email from the White House has been 'deleted', 'misplaced' or simply 'missing' is truly a slap in the face to the American people.

This stuff pisses me off completely...that and the 'dangling chad debacle'.

Re:Email Needs Rethink

[Tablizer]

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

But many file systems don't work well with large quantities of files. It either has to split them up into different folders using some kind of arbitrary hash, or squish bunches of them together. If you have one-file-per-message, it also wastes space due to blocking-size. A RDBMS allows one to just "dump" it in without worrying about many of these issues. DB's are better at managing millions of items, whereas file systems tend to choke when branches get more than about 100,000 items under them. Plus, it's easier to put meta-data on them.