As an email specialist, my biggest questions about recent political  email-related controversies are technical.  It appears to me that the government has not always used best practices for email, which could have prevented the whole recent controversy.

Gone are the days when a single system administrator -- or even several -- could maintain all of a company's IT infrastructure, including email, without being an email specialist.  To run a solid email infrastructure, you need to be somewhat regimented.  You want to standardize as much as possible on hardware and software.  You need to treat all client and server machines the same.  And you shouldn't dream of letting your users set up their own server infrastructures.  Quite the opposite, nowadays more and more email is outsourced to a company like Mimecast or its competitors.

Email systems today are complex enough to require email specialists to run them. Even a general purpose sysadmin isn't usually enough. It should go without saying that few end users even understand their email systems, and none of them should be allowed to administer it.

The government's IT department should be helping its users to use the system -- not replicate and administer it.  Even the most powerful users need to understand this .  Otherwise, if political power trumps technical best practices, all bets are off.

So, that's my take on the recent crisis: technical best practices were not used, possibly overruled on non-technical grounds, and the candidate paid the price.  The media needs to point their cameras at the server rooms and cubicles instead of the candidate.


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In any political campaign, there are legitimate issues (Do we want more immigration or less?)  and ridiculous non-issues (Was Barack Obama born outside the US?).  Less often, there are pseudo-issues with factual answers that are too complex for most voters to understand.  Such is the case with Hillary Clinton's email.

I've spent most of my career -- since 1980 -- working on email technology.  I have watched it become ever more complex, while email itself became ever more important.  I've written a good deal about why email is so complicated (link to my blog posts here).  In fact, after 36 years as an email expert, there are still plenty of things I don't understand about email.

One thing I do understand is that email has long since become a critical and specialized part of human communication.   Gone are the days when a single system administrator -- or even several -- could maintain all of a company's IT infrastructure, including email, without being an email specialist.

If I can't expect a generalist system administrator to run an email system, it should go without saying that I don't expect users even to understand their email system, let alone administer it.  Instead, a company's users entrust their email to whoever they most trust to take good care of it.  Nowadays, the best way to do this is usually by outsourcing it to a company like Mimecast or its competitors.

In the State Department, in the first Obama administration, the person responsible for email was certainly not Hillary Clinton.  A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and if someone advised her to run a private email server, it's not surprising that she complied.  What is surprising, however, is that no one on the State Department's IT staff put a stop to it.

Hillary Clinton is clearly a capable and accomplished woman, qualified to do many things.  But she is absolutely not qualified to run an email system.  No competent IT staff would ever let her do so, and if they didn't stop her she had no way of knowing that what she was doing was a mistake.  It is absurd to hold her responsible for the failures of the IT staff to which the State Department entrusted her email.  (This includes the decision to permit her to use a private server.)

If Hillary Clinton were applying for a technical job at Mimecast, or any other email company, her behavior as secretary of state might well disqualify her.  However, understanding email is not a requirement for the Presidency, and is completely irrelevant to the current campaign.  We're not choosing an email-administrator-in-chief.   We're choosing a Commander in Chief, who should no more worry about how email operates than she worries about how electricity is provided to the White House.  Hillary's email is not an issue.