Perhaps this is the time to tell my Int’l Bus. class instructor’s story about the guy who had the only copy of his masters or doctoral thesis in a cardboard box on the back of his motorcycle (you know, the open box with the elastic over the top?  That kind.) and was driving along the freeway (he attended UCLA—yes, those freeways) when a large gust of wind picked up the whole multi-page document and, well, you know…

I suggest he Copy/Paste into Notepad before he mails next time.

LOL! Can’t you just picture all those sheets of paper fluttering through the air? Omigod, nightmare material.

Long ago and far away...I was working on a 30 page independent study term paper using a KayPro computer with the real floppy disk. It had a relatively small holding capacity. And I hadn’t saved my paper in oh...a long while. Finished the sucker and went to save it. Heh. Saved about half of it. The rest was still on screen and I had 4 hours until class time. I came to the quick conclusion that it would be faster to recreate the paper from my umpty bazillion footnotes than try to copy the last fifteen pages long hand then retype. It was a good decision. Thank God for copious use of footnotes. This was not a professor who tolerated excuses short of death so I had to use those 4 hours efficiently. That was a crash course in the value of saving after every page, lemme tell you. I just made it under the wire and that paper was my only grade for that IS. Talk about panic.

I often use my gmail account as a quick way to save things that I want to access between my work and home computers.  His idea was very smart, but you remembering the Sent Items folder was even smarter.

Send him to the White House ... they still want us to believe that their (no doubt incriminating) email archives are irretrievable.

N, I was just reading something yesterday about such matters. Like...it’s REALLY hard to totally “lose” stuff like that. You have to try really, really hard to “lose” stuff and there are smart and skilled people out there who know how to resurrect that “lost” stuff. So yeah, if it’s irretrievable, they had some really smart and skilled people to make it that way. Don’t think we’re talking about computer illiterates or accidents here. Not that we were thinking “accident” in the first place.

Brian - it earned me a “best mom ever” award, so I’m smilin’.

The thing is—assuming that those really skilled people did make those “missing” emails completely disappear, then there is a record of that activity in somebody’s logs and audit trails.

Unless they also deleted all of those traces ... which would leave another set of logs, ...

Do these people do audits? They don’t follow any other rules. And get away with it. Why would this be any different?

What a nice story Kate, your son is a lucky young man. Not every mom would appreciate a 3AM phone call about a missing email!!! LOL

Glad it all worked out.

As I was reading, I thought, “CHECK YOUR SENT FILE” - but you got to it first.
Does he ever, as a back up, copy the email to a document file?
What a wonderful mother you son has and vice versa.

Aww, I don’t mind 3 AM phone calls from the lad. He’s only called that late a couple of times, but does my heart good to know that when he needs a shoulder, he’s not afraid to call. I’ve told him that he can call any time if he needs to talk.

Morgan, I don’t think he previously kept a copy in a document file, but I’ll bet he does now. While he’s working on a paper, he can store the email on the server as a draft copy before he mails it. But a document file stored on one of those USB flash drive sticks would be an awfully good idea, too.

LOL. Mom to the rescue! Boy was that a 3AM daaaaaaaaa moment!  Poor boy. I so can’t wait to see him lol.

Considering it was 3 AM, I’m rather proud of myself that I thought of it.

We will manage to get you two together at least once this summer. One way or another.