When the Sarah Palin emails – from her time as Alaska's governor – were released on 10 June there was a media frenzy. And – much to the horror of many of our readers – the Guardian was right in the thick of it. It dispatched three journalists and a scanner to Juneau, the state capital, where they began mining the 13,000 emails (running to more than 24,000 printed pages) released following US freedom of information requests. Palin's emails had already been sifted by state officials, and 2,500 were held back.