Many Island County staff members learned just how important good-old-fashioned email technology still is to their jobs this week.

The county’s email server went down first thing Monday morning and was on the fritz much of the week. It finally was back online Friday morning, but at a slowed-down pace, staff members said.

John Kent, the county’s IT director, said part of the reason it took so long to get the system up and running was trouble diagnosing what was wrong. With the help of a consultant from Dell computers, they finally discovered mechanical failures in two of the eight drives.

Kent said they then spent more than two days “rebuilding and repairing data.” He said it’s unlikely that any emails were lost because the county’s system automatically archives emails since they are public records.

Kent said the county is scheduled to go to a more secure email technology in the near future. Ironically, he said, a technology company sent him an email bid on the new system while the email was down.

According to Kent, staff members in different departments quickly realized just how much they rely on emails. Some departments were at a virtual standstill during the outage.