Hillary Clinton’s email has vanished but why can’t yours?

The warnings about the longevity of email are regular and ominous: Don’t be careless with it. Email is forever.

Indeed, in some very high-profile cases it seems that way. Former CIA director and retired US Army General David Petraeus lost his job and his reputation, and “gained” a criminal record in 2012, when emails from an account he thought was private exposed his mishandling of classified information and an affair with his biographer.

Much more recently – just in the past couple of weeks – a trove of embarrassing correspondence from the email account of former secretary of state Colin Powell was posted on the website DCLeaks.com. In the words of an anonymous television anchor, they upended the perception of Powell, also a retired four-star US Army general, as a stoic diplomat and revealed him to be, “just as gossipy as everyone else.”

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here