It appears an untold number of e-mails to and from White House personnel have crashed and landed on an uncharted island in the South Pacific. Whether that's by accident or design, we don't know yet. But it's looking like Friday the 13th is going to be an unlucky day for somebody. Here are the facts, as reported by our government. * According to White House spokesperson Dana Perino, 22 employees of the executive It appears an untold number of e-mails to and from White House personnel have crashed and landed on an uncharted island in the South Pacific. Whether that’s by accident or design, we don’t know yet. But it’s looking like Friday the 13th is going to be an unlucky day for somebody.Here are the facts, as reported by our government.* According to White House spokesperson Dana Perino, 22 employees of the executive branch currently use private e-mail accounts controlled by the Republican National Committee (and outsourced to Smartech, a hosting service in Chattanooga, Tennessee). Over the course of the current administration about 50 White Housers have used such accounts. An unknown number of these messages have gone missing. * In testimony before Congress, Republican National Committee attorney Rob Kelner said the RNC began retaining all e-mail from White House personnel in August 2004. Before that, the RNC purged everything after 30 days. However, Kelner admitted some White Housers were able to delete mail from the servers up until a few weeks ago, though Karl Rove got his deletion privileges revoked some time in 2005.* Meanwhile, watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) claims “five million” e-mail messages are missing from the official White House records.Awfully slippery thing, e-mail. Especially when you use melted butter to lubricate the drive heads on your NAS boxes. As faithful Cringesters well know, many big IT departments tie themselves into pretzels to ensure compliance with federal regulations regarding record retention and storage. So I’m asking all the tech pros out there. If we were talking about a corporation here and not a branch of the federal government or a political party, what would happen?Could high-ranking executives personally erase e-mails, in apparent violation of document retention policies, without consequences? What kind of effort would it take to deliberately erase all traces of email from all servers, network storage devices, backup archives, and client machines so that no amount of computer forensics could recover them? If somebody hired you to find these missing e-mails, where’s the first place you’d look?Got any spare e-mails from Karl Rove sitting on your hard drive? Post them below or send them to me here. Top tipsters will get a bag perfect for stashing secrets. Software DevelopmentSmall and Medium Business