E-mail messages from some of Intel's most senior executives are among those that should have been preserved but were not after the chip-maker was sued for alleged antitrust violations by Advanced Micro Devices, according to a court transcript released by AMD.

Intel revealed last week that some internal e-mails that may be important to the case were missing as a result of errors. The transcript, from a status conference on March 7, indicates that Intel Chairman Craig Barrett and President and CEO Paul Otellini were among those not in compliance with the company's document retention policies.

The executives apparently deleted the e-mail messages, including some to Intel's largest customers, because they were under the false impression that Intel was automatically backing up their e-mail, according to the transcript.

"But the last category that I am very worried about is the senior management -- and I'm talking executive level Barrett and Otellini," said AMD attorney Linda Smith, according to the transcript. "This is the absolute top level. And these are the folks that, even if there's only a two-, three-, four-month gap, they're the major players who are communicating with the heads of other companies."

E-mail messages from several hundred Intel employees have been requested by lawyers for AMD.

Some employee e-mail was lost because workers failed to move messages from their "sent" folder into other folders and it was automatically deleted, while others were lost because Intel failed to notify hundreds of employees to retain e-mails related to the case.

Intel representatives in London declined to comment. Intel spokesman Chuck Mulloy told the Wall Street Journal that the missing information represents "a small proportion of the tens of millions of pages of documents" that Intel will provide in the case. "There is no evidence whatsoever that any relevant e-mails or documents have been lost," he told the Journal.

AMD filed its lawsuit against Intel and its Japanese subsidiary, Intel KK, in 2005, alleging that Intel engaged in anti-competitive practices to support its monopoly in the PC processor market. The lawsuit claims that Intel coerced 38 hardware manufacturers, including Dell and Sony, into using only Intel processors and stopping the promotion of AMD products. Intel denies the charges.

The suit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware, covers Intel operations in North America, Asia, and Europe.