The US State Department will review emails Hillary Clinton wrote on a private account while heading the agency.
However, officials deny being pressured to remove politically damaging revelations ahead of her likely presidential run.
Clinton, the presumed Democratic frontrunner for 2016, found herself in a political furore this week when it was revealed she conducted her official email business from a personal account on a private email server connected to her New York home.
Pressure has mounted, particularly from Republican adversaries, for her to release the entirety of her email correspondence, and the former secretary of state said on Twitter she wanted the public to see her email and "asked State to release them".
State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf acknowledged on Saturday the agency was reviewing the emails "for public release" in accordance with the guidelines of formal US Freedom of Information Act requests.
Harf was vague about whether reviewers intended to report sensitive but unclassified material in their findings should they come across such detail in the emails.
"I'm not going to speculate on what might happen in that situation," she said.
"I'm not going to prejudge the outcome of the review for release of the 55,000 pages."
Asked whether there was political pressure from the White House, or those in Clinton's orbit, to scrub information that could potentially damage a Clinton campaign, Harf said: "No. No."
Team Clinton has been barraged by Republican accusations that she set up the private system to prevent politically sensitive material from going public.
Former New York governor George Pataki, a potential 2016 Clinton rival, called it "outrageous" behaviour and poor judgment from a national figure.
"We don't know what sort of classified information Clinton may have ... shared with others," Pataki told CNN.
Harf declined to provide details when pressed whether the State Department made efforts to improve the security of Clinton's email server at her home or provided guidance for keeping her emails secure.
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