Originally Posted by
Grebe
Actually, if one looks at what was released, they used their boeing email address. It probably took boeing perhaps 1/2 to one hour after A request to find ALL emails over the last three to 5 years between all those involved and less than that to sort thru their emails based on word or phrase search.
Boeing has used an equivalent to a VPN for decades which allow any employee to use their boeing email from almost anywhere in the world. They were using sat communications for AOG in the 60's.
By the look of them, these are Skype-for-Business Instant Messages, associated with Boeing’s Exchange system. IMs are archived in a folder inside Exchange, similarly to ordinary emails. It is likely—though not necessarily relevant—that this will be hosted in the Microsoft cloud (aka Office365), in which case a VPN would not be required for access to send such IMs.
Assuming they hadn’t been deleted—and Boeing’s deletion and retention schedules, if any, would be instructive here—recovering them would be straightforward for an Exchange admin with the right access rights. However, it’s not always as quick an activity as you might expect, and unlike email, individual IMs are not stored as separate messages but in ‘conversations’ (sometimes duplicated) which can complicate reassembling them back into a coherent sequence — perfectly possible, but not as quick as might be expected.