Why do officials really conduct business on personal e-mail?

To our article on the use of personal e-mail accounts, a reader wrote: The big problem for some with using personal accounts is that it is much easier to hide unethical behavior by some of these high level officials. I doubt that the problem with e-mail is that it really "just sucks up time" but actually pins down exact discussions of issues that could be used against those who want to keep things vague and touchy-feely so they can spin things in whatever fashion for political purposes. Just look at most of the people involved in avoiding official e-mail and you can probably figure out why they do not like it.

Adam Mazmanian responds: It's probably difficult to imagine, especially for digital natives, but for a lot of executives in and out of government e-mail might just be a time suck. For a senior executive like Department of Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano, who is on the record as a non-user of e-mail, it might just be easier to get information in staff briefings and dictate notes on official memos and documents, rather than try to stay ahead of a busy, ever-changing e-mail in-box.

Lisa Jackson, former administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, said that she created an alias account under the name Richard Windsor as a workaround to the flood of messages she received at her official, published e-mail address. While her motives were a matter of dispute, Jackson said that the Richard Windsor e-mails were archived according to federal rules.

Government records experts I consulted for the original article said that important notes on document drafts and minutes of meetings by agency heads are considered government records, and are supposed to be archived along with visitor logs, phone logs, and other material that gives an accounting of the movements, contacts and activities of high ranking officials. Of course, this process is subject to human error and deliberate omission. An automatically archived e-mail system of the type provided for in the November 2011 presidential memorandum on records management would provide a more complete record, and presumably wouldn't accommodate any less-than-assiduous records management on the part of senior officials.