Subject Access Requests

[InWalksBarbarella]

I've made a couple of SAR to two government departments. The information relates to me and nothing about it would be considered sensitive or potentially upsetting, just bog standard really.
One of the departments has sent me a suspiciously small amount of paperwork so I contacted them again to basically ask is this it?
They've confirmed to me they've sent it all.

The issue is that the other department has sent me lots of information, and some of that is emails to and from them to the first department and relating to me.
Essentially I know the first department haven't sent me everything even though they said they did.

I don't know how SAR work. If for example an employee sends an email but then deletes it from their system, would the email still be retrieved for the SAR? Or if the employee ceases to work there, would it be reasonable to expect someone (IT or admin?) to access their emails?
I'm just trying to figure out why I haven't been sent the information I requested.

Or if the employee ceases to work there, would it be reasonable to expect someone (IT or admin?) to access their emails

Obviously different departments will have different policies, but the department I work in deletes the email accounts of people who have left after a period of time.

The organisation is only required to disclose information it holds. So, if they don't keep an email archive (or any archive copy has been deleted, e.g. because it is too old) and the sender of an email has deleted it, they no longer hold that information. Similarly, if an employee has left and their mailbox has been deleted, they only hold the information if it is in an archive.

Is it possible they worked together to avoid sending duplicates? When answering SARS we only include one copy of each email sent from A to B rather than multiple copies of the same email just because we got one from A after they checked their emails and the same one from B.

Thanks for the replies, much appreciated.