[Stuart]

What I never understood during the whole Hillary email thing was this. When I was reading up on the whole thing (I do actually like to research stuff I argue about), I read that it's actually quite common for federal employees (up to and including senators) to use their own email systems. It's tolerated because apparently the federal email system is essentially, crap, and it seems no one is willing to invest to fix it.

That's what I don't understand. Where I work, we have to use the work email system for work related emails, purely because we may be in a position where we are discussing personal details, and we have to keep in line with the Data Protection Act. We aren't even officially allowed to forward our mail to an external service (such as Google), but some users seem to get away with that.

Yet the US government seems to tolerate senators using personal email systems even if what they are sending/receiving is potentially classified?

Note: Hillary is far from the only person that has done this. There is also the small matter of the 2 million or so email that vanished from the Republican National Congress server during the last Bush government (something which, oddly, the Republicans forgot to mention when criticising Hillary).

Now, I am not questioning the need for both the RNC and DNC to operate their own email systems. They are their own organisations. They need their own email systems, but I do wonder why the US government doesn't fix it's email system rather than tolerate employees using their own.