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July 12

Deleted emails

Today, the FBI agent Peter Strzok is testifying in Congress. And this brings to mind the issue of the Hillary Clinton email controversy. Long story short, sometimes people are accused of deleting emails. And then law enforcement (or the FBI) cannot "find" those "missing" emails. So, here is my question. Let's say that John (at his G-Mail email address) emails Mary (at her Yahoo email address). Let's further say that John (successfully) deletes all of his emails, and Mary does the same ... through wiping out the hard drive or with Bleach Bit or whatever. My question is: doesn't G-Mail and/or Yahoo still have copies of these emails somewhere? On their servers or on the cloud or somewhere? Thanks. Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 23:50, 12 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

It would depend on their retention policies. Deleting an email on Gmail, for example, sends it to a trash folder on Google's servers where it's "permanently" deleted after 30 days (unless you manually delete it sooner). This article and this one (both fairly old) say that offline backups are kept for 60 days after that. Google appears to be cagey regarding what's kept beyond that or for how long. See also Exporting & deleting your information and How Google retains data we collect for Google specific policies. As with most online services, the truth is buried deep within the terms of service and/or obfuscated by legalese. clpo13_(talk) 00:19, 13 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Or that information isn't public at all. --76.69.47.228 (talk) 07:48, 13 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Clinton famously used her own email server in order to prevent the possibility of someone else retaining copies of the email. That she wiped it "with a cloth" became the subject of many jokes. 173.228.123.166 (talk) 02:45, 16 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]