However I have some advice for those sending out releases, on basic stuff if you want the PR read. Because when you are busy you triage your time.

1. Put the snappy subject of the PR in the subject line. Don’t just say “PR from xxxx”. Tells me nothing. The subject line may determine if I click to view it during the 2 second preview, and if I open it.
2. It is okay to have a nicely formatted version as an attachment, but also include the message in the main body of the e-mail. This both increases greatly the chance I will read it, and also makes it easier to copy and paste extracts without getting the awful HTML formatting from Word.
3. Keep attachments to under 1 MB. Most of the time not an issue, but if out travelling the 3G service can take a while to cope with large attachments.

It’s tempting to just delete them all, but of the 7,000 there are always a couple of dozen that I need to respond to, even months later. I have a sort of triage system where I try and respond at the time to the urgent stuff and intend to come back to the other stuff, but then they drop out of sight.

Anyway over the last few days my holiday task has been to empty my inbox, and late last night it finally hit zero. Yay. Challenge for 2009 is to empty it no later than the end of each week!

“The Police had to address issues of ‘theft’ and ‘stealing’ because that is what Don Brash alleged. But in today’s finding the Police are saying they have no idea how the leaks occurred and that they have found no evidence of any crime being committed.”

 ”This was always going to be the outcome because the information came from legitimate leaks. I believe the National Party used the allegations of theft, and thereby wasted Police resources, to try to distract attention away from the serious revelations in the book.”

Nicky would have you think hey the Police said no crime here, move along. But let us look at what they did say:

Police have closed their investigation into the theft of e-mails from former National Party leader Dr Don Brash and have announced that they have been unsuccessful in identifying those responsible for the thefts.

Hmmn, they called them thefts. Not leaks.

Detective Inspector Harry Quinn, the Officer in Charge of the investigation and Wellington Police District Crime Services Manager, said today that police had been unable to establish with certainty how the e-mails had actually been stolen.

And here they say the e-mails were stolen – they just don’t know how.

“How the thefts occurred still largely remains a mystery,” said Detective Inspector Quinn. “We have eliminated the suggestion that an external ‘computer hacker’ had breached the computer security within Parliament but there remains many other potential ways in which the crimes could have occurred.”

Again they repeat this was a theft, and all they rule out is an “external” hacker. This does not rule out numerous other scenarios such as a IT staffer with system access, an insecure password, or even someone taking advantage of a computer left logged in.

“There are strong indications that the e-mails were in printed form at the time of the theft, but with the thefts perhaps happening at any time over the two- year period it is very likely that they were stolen during several incidents,” Detective Inspector Quinn said.

I have no idea if the thefts were done of print outs, of electronic files or a mixture of both. But I would point out that someone sneaking into someone’s office, rummaging through their filing cabinet, and then taking papers from that filing cabinet is not a leak, but as the Police say – theft.

A leak is when you release information you legitimately have access to. Take for example the draft Green Party List that was leaked to me. A Green Party member who legitimately had a copy of the list, leaked it. Now that is massively different to a scenario where say only two people had a copy of the Green Party List and it was stored in Jeanette Fitzsimons’ office, and someone entered that office without authorisation, rummaged through her laptop or office files, and then stole a copy of the list, to give it to me.