Ten years after Enron’s painfully spectacular collapse, anyone with Internet access and some serious time to burn can relive the company’s implosion in excruciating detail by exploring an online digital graveyard of more than a half-million email messages retrieved from Enron insiders.

Painstakingly indexed and organized during the criminal and congressional investigations, the myriad lawsuits and the bankruptcy proceedings, this publicly searchable trove of data represents one of the few silver linings that we can take away from Enron’s downfall. While Enron lives on as a painful memory, this unique body of digital communications has already proven to be a priceless collection for studying internal corporate messages from this once-high-flying, politically ambitious and powerfully diverse company. For years now it has offered researchers and academics of all stripes a rare glimpse into how we communicate in our evolving digital age.

Even after 10 years, perusing the Enron email corpus provides a fascinating voyeuristic thrill. Besides the sheer size of the bankruptcy, Enron was unique because perhaps like no corporate scandal before it, digital communications provided investigators with a real-time account of the events as Enron collapsed. After all, by the time the company faltered – gradually, then suddenly, to borrow from Hemingway – we had firmly entered a time in which electronic messages had widely replaced the old-fashioned phone call or office visit. At the same time, it had not yet dawned on most of us back in 2001 that data like this never really disappears – that the delete button merely creates the illusion of a blank screen.

Take a spin around this archive and you’ll stumble across all of the significant details of the Enron story: the internal whistleblower’s seemingly unheeded warnings, the cynical snipes of dollar-driven employees, the opulent lifestyles of Enron execs and their families, and the mundane details of the workaday world. And, sadly, like any email trove in existence, you’ll invariably come across the spam emails, the forwarded jokes and the adult-oriented content.

via Ten years later, the lessons learned from the Enron emails – Houston Chronicle.