Jonah, it is possible to lose e-mails forever. In litigation against the EPA during the Clinton administration, Landmark Legal Foundation specifically sought e-mail records of the top officials at the agency. After representing to a federal judge that they’d secured the records, they later learned that the agency had a process in place for years whereby it routinely erased the e-mail from its server. The U.S. attorneys office attempted to recreate the e-mail records, but they couldn’t.