E-mail disaster recovery niche market growing

This may not be another Watergate, but here are the facts: Tech News World’s Erika Morphy reports that of the 88 White House officials who also have e-mail accounts with the Republican National Committee (RNC), some 51 are missing records, according to a House Oversight Committee interim report released on Monday. The investigation stems from a larger Congressional probe into the firing of eight U.S. Attorneys by the Department of Justice (DoJ), and the possible political motivations behind their ousters. In response to the inquiry, the Bush administration admitted that some of the e-mails sought could not be found — specifically those sent from an RNC e-mail address. The RNC’s policy is to delete e-mails after a certain period of time. E-mails sent from the White House, by contrast, must — by law — be preserved indefinitely (also see the Washington Post’s Michael Abramowitz report, in which he says that RNC officials told told congressional investigators that White House senior political adviser Karl Rove sent or received more than 140,000 e-mails between 2002 and 2007).

Now, we have to wait for the inquiry’s conclusion to find out what happened here: Did White House and DoJ employees use the RNC e-mail system becasue, as the White House argues, the Hatch Act mandates that federal employees may not use government communications infrastructure or equipment for political purposes? Or was it the case that the senders were using the RNC e-mail address becasue they knew of the RNC’s e-mail deletion policies, thus making sure that their e-mails would not be available for subsequent investigation?

Even before waiting for the inquiry’s conclusion, the story above tells us what we have already noticed — that there is a growing niche market which investors may want to explore: Recovering lost e-mails. A new study by Palo Alto, Califrnia-based Radicati Group forecasts that the worldwide revenue for the e-mail disaster recovery market will reach $635 million worldwide by the end of 2007 and then grow further to $887 million by 2011.

“E-mail Disaster Recovery Market, 2007-2011” offers an analysis of the worldwide market for e-mail disaster recovery solutions, providing market trends, vendor installed base and revenue market share, four-year forecasts, technology trends, and an analysis of key players in the market. The study shows that the market for e-mail disaster recovery is primarily driven by the need for messaging continuity and by the increase in security threats. Vendors are increasingly developing e-mail disaster recovery solutions to complement worldwide messaging growth.

Michael: The following text should be in a blue box

A federal court decision earlier this week could give e-mail users broad new privacy protections against the government — but may well hobble criminal investigations. On Monday the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in Ohio held that Internet users had a reasonable expectation of privacy in the content of personal e-mails being stored by Internet service providers such as Yahoo! and Google. ABC News’s Scott Michels reportsthat it was the first federal appellate court decision to recognize a wide constitutional right to privacy in personal e-mails. The ruling only applies in the Sixth Circuit, but if followed by other federal courts, the case could shift the debate in the unsettled area of Internet privacy law.

The three-judge panel of the Sixth Circuit upheld a lower court order that found federal investigators in an Ohio fraud investigation had overstepped their constitutional power by obtaining e-mails from an Internet service provider without a warrant. “It goes without saying that like the telephone earlier in our history, e-mail is an ever-increasing mode of private communication, and protecting shared communications through this medium is as important to Fourth Amendment principles today as protecting telephone conversations has been in past,” the court said.