JUNEAU -- The state of Alaska will release thousands of Sarah Palin's emails from her first two years as governor today, a disclosure that has taken on national prominence as she flirts with a run for the presidency. Msnbc.com, Mother Jones, ProPublica and are working with Crivella West Inc. to create a searchable database of the emails. The Associated Press also plans to scan the paper copies to make searchable files available to its members and clients. That would would entail collecting and reviewing a lot of information. The voluminous nature of the release, the isolation of Juneau and the limited bandwidth in the city of 30,000 people have forced media outlets to come up with creative ways to transmit the information. Perez said Palin gave the state a CD with emails from her Yahoo account, and other employees were asked to review their private accounts for emails related to state business and to send those to their state accounts. Linda Perez, the administrative director of the Alaska governor’s office, replied, “We are unable to access records from the nonstate email accounts as we are not the account owner or customer of the providers.” 
 
 Regarding this Yahoo account, the state, Perez reported, could only gather emails that Palin had sent to or received from the official email accounts of other state employees, including her aides. Days later, the news emerged that Palin had used a second private account to communicate with a small circle of staff members—further complicating the effort to gather her emails. When Palin resigned as governor in July 2009, the governor’s office asked the journalists seeking her emails if we were “still interested in the requested records.” Yes, we replied. Now, another six months later, the governor’s office has missed that date, but by only 10 days. Sean Parnell, who served as Palin’s lieutenant governor. Emails that were sent to or from her personal email to people other than those 51 state employees—even if these communications involved state business—will not be part of this batch, nor will emails that Palin sent from her personal accounts to the personal accounts of aides and other state officials. Reporters from several news organizations have already begun arriving in Juneau and are making various plans to disseminate the emails to the public.
– Today’s the big day: The 24,199-page, 275-pound trove of emails from the first two years of Sarah Palin’s stint as governor of Alaska is almost here. The state will release them at 9am local time (1pm ET), reports Mother Jones, which requested the emails back in 2008. Reporters began arriving in Juneau, which is only accessible by air or water, yesterday, the Anchorage Daily News reports. They will pick up six boxes’ worth of documents and a hand truck (which they have to bring back), and immediately start a mad scramble to report on what they find. Click to see how you can help the Washington Post do just that.