Are most North Carolinians spammer?  

Among the more interesting statistics mentioned at Friday's meeting of Gov. Mike Easley's e-mail retention panel was the fact that the state's firewall blocks about 95 percent of all messages addressed to state workers as spam, Michael Biesecker reports.

A skeptic could wonder if that's why some administration employees seem so difficult to get in touch with. But George Bakolia, the state's chief information officer, assured the group that the blocked messages were the usual solicitations to participate in get-rich-quick schemes in Africa or ads for erectile dysfunction pills.

Bakolia admitted that on occasion, however, the firewall had barred legitimate attempts at communication. Specifically, he said he used to get complaints from former Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Carmen Hooker Odom.

It seems the spam-blocking software took exception to her middle name.

State employees routinely trash millions of potential public records, according to presentations given today at the first meeting of a committee appointed by Gov. Mike Easley to review his administration's policies for retaining e-mails.

The state's public records law makes no distinction between e-mails and other types of documents that the government is required to retain and provide to the public.

George Bakolia, the chief of computer services for the Easley administration, told the committee that state employees are sent about 5.5 million e-mails a day, reports Michael Biesecker.

About 95 percent of those e-mails are immediately "declared worthless" by two layers of spam-blocking software. The remaining 270,000 e-mails are delivered to the computers of the estimated 62,100 executive branch employees with e-mail accounts.

That figure does not include the hundreds of thousands of e-mails state employees send to each other daily or those that they address to people outside state government. Each employee is allotted a limited amount of digital memory on state servers and mainframe computers.

Read more after the jump.

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Gov. Mike Easley has named his e-mail panel.

Easley announced today that the panel, which he has asked to review policies concerning the retention of e-mail messages under the state's public records law, will hold its first meeting Thursday morning.

Easley had previously announced that Franklin Freeman, one of his senior aides, will lead the panel and that Ferrel Guillory, director of the Program on Public Life at UNC-CH, will serve on the panel.

Other panel members announced today:

Ned Cline, former managing editor of the Greensboro News & Record.

DeWitt F. "Mac" McCarley, the city attorney for Charlotte.

Staci Meyer, chief deputy secretary for the N.C. Department of Cultural Resources.

George Bakolia, the state's chief information officer.

Bryan Beatty, secretary of the N.C. Department of Crime Control and Public Safety.

David Lawrence, a professor at the UNC School of Government and an expert on public records laws, will serve as an advisor to the panel.

The first meeting will be at 10:30 a.m. Thursday in the Council of State meeting room on the 5th floor of the Administration Building at 16 W. Jones Street in Raleigh. Easley said meetings of the panel will be open to the public.