It took a while, but all those Palin emails are back in email form, more or less.
According to the UK's The Guardian, the Sunlight Foundation, a non-profit government-openness advocacy group, may have found a solution to the sheer hassle involved with reading and searching through all those inconvenient, printed emails.
At the suggestion of a member of the public, Sunlight created "Sarah's Inbox," a framework that presents the documents as a set of emails -- which they were to begin with -- enabling readers to read them the same way they would an email inbox.
The process used text-recognition software and scanning to convert the hard-copies into digital format. Messages in "Sarah's Inbox" contain all the text, CC fields, subject lines, and dates present in the originals, but the transfer wasn't totally flawless, writes Sunlight's Nicko Margolies.
"Sarah's Inbox faced staggering issues of data quality because government officials continue to release digital files as hideous printouts requiring a laborious and error-ridden optical character recognition (OCR) pass over," says Margolies. "You will notice that many of the emails are garbled, incomplete or contain odd characters – please keep in mind that we did the best with what we had and are not responsible for the content. Due to the programmatic nature of the tools used to build this site, we recommend checking any research effort against the source files."
Wander around in the database, here.