@robb I particularly love the idea that they're so ignorant that they don't understand that the equipment doesn't disappear when you delete your eMails...

In fact, they probably don't even understand that nothing actually gets deleted, it's just marked as deleted so that it's not visible anymore -- for a variety of reasons like:

• running a deletion process is too time-consuming or expensive
• they want the ability to 'undo' a delete at some point in the future
• they want to retain all data for reasons they already know, or for reasons they haven't dreamt up yet.
• they retain data as a result of a deal with government or intelligence agencies for data mining, preservation of evidence of crimes, etc.