Helping Henry Waxman

Representative Henry A. Waxman is chairman of a House committee investigating the use of political e-mail accounts. This was written up in article today in the New York Times: Missing E-Mail May Be Related to Prosecutors by Sheryl Stolberg April 13, 2007.

The article says that Carl Rove and other White House "officials" maintain separate e-mail accounts for government work vs. political work and that Democrats in Congress suspect that the political accounts may have been used to "conduct official work without leaving a paper trail." And then the article gets more specific:

"...documents also revealed that a deputy to Mr. Rove, Scott Jennings, who works in the White House Office of Political Affairs, had used his Republican National Committee e-mail account, ending in gwb43.com, to communicate about the dismissals with a top aide to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales."

Given a domain name (such as gwb43.com) any competent computer nerd can learn where emails to that domain are being sent. It may help Mr. Waxman find any missing email messages. :-)

Email messages sent to recipients at gwb43.com get stored on one of these two computers:

mailscan1.smartechcorp.net
mailscan2.smartechcorp.net

The IP address of the first email receiving computer is 64.203.97.101. The machine resides in Chattanooga Tennessee (latitude: 35.048100, longitude: -85.283302) and is registered to Smartech Corporation. See for yourself.

The IP address of the second email receiving computer is 64.203.98.245 and it is also in Chattanooga.

Background: Every computer on the Internet is assigned a unique number which us nerds call an IP address. It is actually a 32 bit binary number, but for ease of use is always written in decimal with periods in the middle of it.