Alicante City Council has told the judge investigating the allocation of public housing at the Les Naus development that it is technically unable to provide emails exchanged in mid-2018 by two officials in its Heritage Department, both now retired. The council’s IT service cites the age of the records, which date back more than eight years.
The judge also requested authenticated copies of emails sent and received through the department’s general account. The council said it had recovered messages from that account only for the period before June 2021.
In a written submission, the council explained that its backup systems at the time retained monthly copies for a maximum of one year. Over the past eight years, it used three different backup-management systems and an email system that is no longer in use. The council said the relevant backups had expired and no records from those systems remained.
The current email backup system, introduced in 2024, retains monthly copies for five years and daily copies for one year. The submission says the council has no email backups from before those retention periods, leaving it unable to establish whether mailboxes were deleted or to recover the requested messages.
Sources: elDiario.es.