Request for Email Metadata (Information Technology)
Multi Request | Request for Email Metadata |
Submitted | Jan. 25, 2019 |
Est. Completion | None |
MuckRock users can file, duplicate, track, and share public records requests like this one. Learn more.
Communications
From: Matt Chapman
To Whom It May Concern:
Pursuant to the North Carolina Public Records Law, I hereby request the following records:
For all email accounts under the management of this city, please provide me the following information for all emails sent and received during January, 2019:
1. From address
2. To address
3. bcc addresses
4. cc addresses
5. Time
6. Date
E-mail metadata is trivially exportable from the IT infrastructure of any modern e-mail archiving or data retention system - such as Microsoft Outlook 365, Google, Datacove, etc. - and should be deliverable in a .CSV, .XLS, or other machine readable format.
Please note that I am not requesting the contents of each email. E-mail metadata does not include the contents of the specified e-mails, thus do not need individual review for redaction.
The requested documents will be made available to the general public, and this request is not being made for commercial purposes.
In the event that there are fees, I would be grateful if you would inform me of the total charges in advance of fulfilling my request. I would prefer the request filled electronically, by e-mail attachment if available or CD-ROM if not.
Thank you in advance for your anticipated cooperation in this matter. I look forward to receiving your response to this request within 10 business days.
Sincerely,
Matt Chapman - Free Our Info, NFP
From: Information Technology
This falls outside the scope of the NC Public records law. We can provide existing documents, but we don’t create records for people.
If you need anything else, please let me know.
David Blount
Communications
From: Matt Chapman
This request does not require the creation of records, as the records pursuant to this request already exist in a discrete context separate from the contents of emails themselves. Any steps to retrieve the requested documentation is simply retrieving those discrete records.
Here is the technical documentation which describes how messages are stored within Exchange for storing emails: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee158780(v=exchg.80).aspx . The takeaway from this document is that while a message itself is an object (a record), there are subobjects (also records) for 1. the message body, 2. recipients and sender(s) 3. subject line and 4. attachments. To the extent that you would likely consider an attachment to be a distinct record, despite being a component of an email message in its method of storage, then it follows that the recipient objects of an email would be a distinct record apart from the message themselves.
With this information in mind, please re-review the request.
From: Muckrock Staff
To Whom It May Concern:
I wanted to follow up on the following North Carolina Public Records Law request, copied below, and originally submitted on Jan. 25, 2019. Please let me know when I can expect to receive a response.
Thanks for your help, and let me know if further clarification is needed.
From: Information Technology
There’s been no change in this. I resubmitted your request and it’s still deemed to fall outside of the NC Public Records Law.
Files
There are no files associated with this request.