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A Couple More Reasons Why Hillary Clinton Should Not Use A Private Email Server For Official Correspondence

I was pondering whether anyone could be stupider than the IRS with handling emails when I learned that Ms. Clinton ran her own computer system for her official emails. Which part of violating government document retention requirements of the Federal Records Act, impeding an ongoing investigation, and potentially leaking sensitive government information does she not understand? They just threw the book at General Petraeus over leaking sensitive government information! I immediately came up with a bunch of questions like:

  • How did she read top secret emails?
  • Were any of the Benghazi emails on her server confidential or secret?
  • Which Inspector General signed off on this email server fiasco?
  • Is she deliberately sabotaging her 2016 presidential election?

Then I decided I should give her the benefit of the doubt till I did a little more research. With a little more time to ponder the AP report,  Clinton ran her own computer system for her official emails, I have to say that of all of the bone-headed things for a Secretary of State to do, running a mail server from your home is at the top of my list. I am an IT professional who ran a mail server from my home and I can say unequivocally that it is a pain in the butt. In addition to the hardware requirements you have to be concerned about security, backups, and disaster recovery. To top it off it is particularly difficult to get the Domain Name System settings correct so that your emails do not end up in everyone’s spam folder. Even if you have to pay Google, Microsoft, or Yahoo, let them do it. You will be much better off. It is not worth your time and money to run a mail server from your home!

I cringe thinking about this but if we assume the AP report is correct then what can we say about her email server setup. My first check found out that her email is filtered from spam and protected from viruses by Mxlogic. This matches the claim in the article but it begs the question what did she do before she signed up with Mxlogic in 2013? I know Mxlogic was protecting my company email back in 2008. Did she run a naked email server? Then I checked for TXT records. I did not find any. This is the part of the DNS that email providers check to see if you are who you say you are. In my day job I manage a newsletter with over 80,000 subscribers. To keep in the good graces of the email world we include TXT records for SPF and DKIM so the major email providers know that we really are the one sending the email and not a spammer. At the very minimum you should have a static IP for the mail server and the DNS should have a TXT record for SPF, an A record for the sub-domain pointing to the IP of the email server, and a reverse PTR record for the sub-domain. So how did a person getting an email from this server know it was Ms. Clinton and not someone impersonating her? I don’t think I want to know  any more. Ms. Clinton running an email server is far worse than anything that General Petraeus did!