Using FOIA for emails

Requesting emails can be extremely insightful, but also a bit of an exemptions minefield.

If your request is not narrowly tailored enough, you’re likely to get hit with an “unduly burdensome” rejection. If you pass that threshold, you might be denied on the basis that communications between employees are deliberative and pre-decisional.

Let’s say you get past all that, because of course you’ve read the exemptions super closely and tailored your request narrowly enough. In that case, communication records can be very impactful.

For example, freelance journalist Matt Bernardini requested communications between the Philadelphia Police Department and the Drug Enforcement Administration for a 4-day period in 2020. Bernardini’s FOIA requested communications specifically related to the protests following the killing of George Floyd.

Although the records came back heavily redacted, they showed the DEA assisting PPD in monitoring the protests, including surveillance of social media.

Key tips

Narrowing down dates

While you can certainly try to FOIA for all emails across a certain topic, providing a narrow time window and precise search terms related to a specific incident can produce transparency into the operations and decision-making processes of agencies.
Include a date range relevant to your request. We recommend limiting the range to two weeks for uncooperative agencies, if possible. Of course, every case is different, but try to narrow as much as possible. To see just how precise you can go, see this MuckRock user’s request for the single most recent email in the general inbox, spam and sent folders of a Chief FOIA officer on a given day.

Targeting inboxes

Include enough precision for the custodian to identify the inboxes that you want searched. Ideally this is a specific set of email addresses at the agency. See, for example, how this simple request for communications between two individuals yielded over 150 pages of responsive records.
If you don’t know the names of individual employees, try something like, “The inboxes of people who work within the Office of Special Investigations” or “Jane Smith and all employees who report directly to her.”
Alternatively, try to narrow down to individuals involved in the process you’re researching. For example, “please search the inbox of anyone who would be likely to be regularly involved within the mandatory reporting of sexual assault cases from the prison’s medical unit.” Agencies’ websites often have contact information/team pages that can help narrow down your request.
If you’re looking for communications between two agencies, you can try a specific email address of someone at one agency and the domain address for the email of the other agency. For example, “please search all emails between jo hndoe@fbi.gov and any email with the @state.gov domain.

Crafting keywords

We don’t recommend asking for records “about” a topic. This leaves the determination of relevance up to the discretion of the FOIA officer and may yield varying results.
Instead, we suggest offering a list of keywords that you can imagine would be used by employees discussing the topic. For example, instead of asking for emails “about” mandatory reporting of sexual assaults, you could request messages containing the keywords “sexual assault,” “mandatory reporting,” and “unsubstantiated.” Imagine that you’re trying to write out very specific instructions for someone that’s good at misunderstanding anything that might involve going beyond a very literal interpretation of your request. We also recommend including the phrase “non-case sensitive” in front of these keywords, in order to include all forms of capitalization.
Think about shorthand or acronyms that employees are likely to use as variations of your keywords. For example, a keyword search for “Assembly Bill 303” would have missed emails which refer to the bill as “AB 303.”
At the same time, avoid search terms that are likely to generate a large volume of irrelevant emails. This will likely result in high fees or an unduly burdensome exemption due to the agency’s need to review and redact all relevant documents. For example, a requester was asked to pay $2,400 to cover the cost of the more than 100 staff hours it would take to review and redact emails with the term “strike.” By narrowing the search to include only emails with both the phrases “Denver Classroom Teachers Association” and “teachers strike,” the requester received a batch of 20 documents free of charge.

Requesting across departments

If you know another agency to which the emails would have been sent, that is a great opportunity to file a request with both departments, asking each of them for any emails sent to the other. Try to limit the pool of people whose inboxes you want searched.
If you’re able to follow the other suggestions and can include a ‘to:’ field, you may be able to drop the keywords, instead requesting “Emails sent from [the following group of employees] to any email at the domain stateagency.gov.”
Check out this simple request from a MuckRock user, which liberated over 70 emails between employees of a Washington jail and the offices of the Seattle mayor and Seattle city attorney.

Using a log to identify emails

Another approach is to start by requesting a log of emails for a specific employee or entity. Be sure to specify that the log should include information showing the sender, recipient, date, subject line, and any attachments. Once you get the log back, you can pick specific emails from the list that you’d like to request.
See, for example, a CPS email log request from The FOIA Bakery and the subsequent request for specific emails based on the log. As shown in the latter request, you can simply highlight the specific emails you would like to receive and send the log back to the agency as a reference.

Don’t give up!

Like any FOIA request, certain agencies will take an unbelievably long time to respond to you. Hang in there! When it finally comes back, you can usually find something interesting. Journalist Derek Mead FOIA’d the Central Intelligence Agency in 2014 for emails related to the agency’s first tweet was rewarded over seven years later with 18 pages of inside baseball showing CIA employees trying to be funny.

Remember there is so much to be learned from agency communications. Beyond the content itself, emails can provide a lot of information about how an agency functions, from agency culture to technological competencies. Be creative and be persistent.

Image: Canva