deleting email
Back in the minicomputer days, I worked for a contractor supporting a federal (civil) agency. We had to purge email every few weeks, for Word Perfect Office kept all messages in a single directory, and beyond a few thousand files, response got to be terrible. This led to a couple of odd consequences.
First, mail purges were tricky around the new year. It was easy for on operator on (say) January 5, 1993 to specify deletion of all mail created before December 20, 1993 rather than December 20, 1992, and so remove all mail. I ended up reverse-engineering the mailbox format and writing an ugly but effective program that would not purge into the future.
Second, at some point it was thought desirable to save the emails of persons at a high enough level in the organization--perhaps the political appointees. I wrote an ugly but effective program for that also. However, we found that such persons tended to spend their last few weeks on vacation, so the program typically harvested nothing but broadcast emails.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
