There are good reasons not to save every e-mail sent by public officials. The reasons to do so are better still.

The revelation that Hillary Clinton used a personal e-mail account during her tenure as Secretary of State has drawn attention to an area of public transparency that, most would agree, is still in an evolutionary period. Among the questions that the new reports spurred is this: Should we mandate that all written communication between public officials be preserved? Should we expect that government agencies will preserve e-mails, as is commonly done with other written records?

Rules (and laws) vary by jurisdiction; the federal government only started mandating that electronic communication be preserved in 2014. Other places have different systems. To someone who writes for The Washington Post, it seems very much worth the cost and effort to preserve it all as long as possible. How records are stored is ultimately a decision made by elected officials, who are meant to act as a reflection of the will of the people. We're early enough in the debate that most people haven't paid it much thought. Perhaps they are today.