The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee used nothing but a personal email account to conduct official business during her four years at the State Department, The New York Times reported Monday.


Hillary Rodham Clinton’s apparent decision to spurn a ".gov” account, which may have broken rules, meant that sensitive information sharing and communication with world leaders were conducted through a private, and possibly non-secure, account.


"It is very difficult to conceive of a scenario — short of nuclear winter — where an agency would be justified in allowing its cabinet-level head officer to solely use a private email communications channel for the conduct of government business,” Jason Baron, former director of litigation at the National Archives and Records Administration, told the Times.


A Clinton spokesman said she complied with the "letter and spirit of the rules,” but refused to explain why she opted for a personal account.


The unofficial email usage came to light two weeks ago after a House committee investigating the attacks on the consulate in Benghazi received 300 of Clinton’s emails from the State Department, the paper reported.


A couple of months before that, aides for the former First Lady went through her correspondence and gave the State Department 55,000 emails to comply with federal record-keeping practices and laws that require that national records are archived.


The Times said Clinton, who stepped down in 2013, never had a government email address and her correspondence wasn’t preserved, despite requirements by the federal Records Act.

The digital delinquency immediately sparked online reactions, with comments from both sides of the aisle slamming the apparent flouting of rules — and wondering how the lack of an official email address didn’t come to light until now."Personal emails are not secure,” Thomas Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, a government transparency advocacy group, was quoted as saying. "Senior officials should not be using them.”


Many noted the Clintons’ long-held disposition toward secrecy and some described the revelation as "shocking” and worse..Others took a more light-hearted approach, trying to speculate which service the Secretary has used — was it AOL or Yahoo? — and what was her exact email address.