It is unlikely the raw mail spools were copied, and not very likely the POP account itself was hacked because many of the emails go back 13 years. The hacker apparently either didn't think the mail headers were important, very unlikely, or the only text of the mail were stored separate from the mail spools, much more likely.

Someone most probably hacked into a SAN server and read the archives. They knew what they were looking for, suggesting an inside job.

Jilted girlfriend ( or boyfriend ) or paramour is the most likely vector. Possibly someone's cool new tech boyfriend offering hurting, poor, suffering significant other some "closure."

The hacker knew exactly what to look for and, read the archives and copied the text.

And while they were at it, they copied some of the Fortran programs used to compile the global warming data for their computer models, but they failed to get the data used in gridding a visual representation of the data, which according to the comments in the Fortran code, was a major reason for all the programming.

A lot of other files were taken as well suggesting home directories stored in a remote server. Since this was at a university, it is extremely likely a computer science student did the dirty work.

But since the only email presented were the most damaging ones, it is possible a source upstream paid for the job.


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