Who You Gonna Call? Email Busters!
Posted by Amy Dugdale on Thu, Jul 09, 2009 @ 12:44 PM
According to a recent AP story, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin is missing emails - and lots of them.
Christopher Reade, a partner in a tech firm who assisted the Louisiana Technology Council in efforts to recover data for the mayor's office, said the mailbox was removed between June 2008 and May 2009. He said 22 gigabytes of data vanished from a defunct server on May 5 - the day of a conference call with the city on the work the outside technology experts would do - but he did not know if the mailbox was among that data.
The city of New Orleans has blamed the missing messages on a faulty server, but Reade's investigation has concluded that the loss of emails "could not be attributed to server damage that the city says occurred in June 2008." In fact, out of all the mailboxes of City Hall employees, Nagin's was the only one missing.
It has now turned into a He Said/He Said with Reade concluding that it would take a "technically competent human action" to remove the mailbox. However, the city's technology chief, M. Harrison Boyd, maintains that the mailbox was not intentionally removed by anyone on the staff.
Now, even Mayor Nagin himself is weighing in and declaring that all the missing messages have been found. Meanwhile, a Times-Picayune blog post is going so far as to call for a criminal investigation into the actions that led to the disappearance of the mayor's mailbox (and all of his email messages since he took office in 2002).
Should be interesting to watch this one play out ... I think I saw a proton pack for sale on eBay in case anyone's looking for one ...