Outlook.com Email Forensics — How To Analyze Emails
Microsoft Outlook.com is a web-based email client application. Formerly known as Hotmail, Outlook.com email artifacts such as, username, subject, and body, comes in great use during a digital investigation related to Outlook.com email data. Thus, it requires proper Outlook.com Email Forensics of the artifacts in the emails. Email analysis and investigation are a vast arena. Therefore a robust and reliable tool is required to automate this process and make your life easier.
The Need For Outlook.com Email Forensics
Although each situation is unique, over 100 trillion emails are sent a year, making it a crucial evidentiary component in nearly every case litigated today. Large organizations have retention policies in place, or even email archiving for regulatory purposes, that store email evidence for years in a searchable and retrievable format. The purpose of an email investigative tool is to provide an examination of such repositories, regardless of their type/format.
Required Features of Outlook.com Email Forensics Tools
And further serve the complete, basic and advanced requirements of each email investigation stage that includes:
- Evidence Email Scanning: A good tool should be very reliable during the scanning process. For forensic applications, integrity of the data is very necessary.
- Analysis of Emails and Attachments: Once you upload the evidence, it is essential that the utility properly scans the files. Since there are various types of data to be dealt with, this feature should be robust. A detailed viewing option should be present for analysis of attachments present in the emails.
- Track Investigation: This feature is very important for a tool. the tool should have a proper investigation tracking procedure. This makes it easy to track the progress of a ongoing case. This is also helpful in the case of multiple cases as it increases organization and decreases cluttering.
- Report Generation: On the completion of email data recovery and analysis, evidence can be exported into multiple file formats according to the type of data.
- Deleted Email Recovery: For forensic investigations the tool needs to have the ability to recover and restore deleted emails. The tool should be able to retrieve emails in case someone deletes them. This ensures the admissibility of the evidence during Outlook.com Email Forensics.
- Email Metadata Analysis: The tool should be capable of extracting and analyzing email metadata. This information is very important for tracking the source of emails and identifying potential malicious activities.
- Email Search and Filtering: An effective search and filtering functionality is an integral part for investigators to quickly locate specific emails based on keywords, sender/recipient information etc. This feature allows investigators to narrow down the scope of their investigation and focus on relevant emails.
Tool for Outlook.com Email Forensic Analysis
There are multiple tools available for the analysis of email data. One tool which fits best for Outlook.com email forensics and covers most of the common file formats for email examination is MailXaminer. To fulfill the need for case documentation. The software provides the complete dashboard to easily manage cases and email investigation, where it provides the complete information of the scan file(s) and similarly it fulfills the other requirements of the tool in a respective manner.
This tool offers some very advanced features like:
- Different File Formats: With support for this feature you can easily work with a variety of file types, including email files, cloud files, and even image files. This versatility makes the tool highly convenient.
- Advanced OCR Capabilities, The tool boasts enables the analysis of keywords in image files and attachments. This powerful OCR functionality simplifies the investigation of evidence contained within images. Notably, this feature sets it apart from many other competing software in the market.
- Advanced Keyword Based Analysis: Through this feature you can utilize the advanced search option to identify the occurrence and frequency of words in emails. Additionally, it facilitates the analysis of the relationship between the suspect/user and specific keywords. Word Cloud, Timeline Analysis, Link Analysis, and Entity Analysis are some of the methods available for implementing this analysis.
- Innovative Search Analytics Windows: The enables email forensic officers to establish connections between users more easily. The tool offers options such as Word Cloud, Timeline Analysis, Link Analysis, and Entity Analysis for this purpose.
- Multiple In-Built Search Options: This tool provides offering a comprehensive set of features to end-users. These search options include General Search, Proximity Search, Fuzzy Search, Stem Search, Wildcard Search, and Regular Expression. Forensic investigators can conduct in-depth search operations by defining search criteria based on specific words using these options.
- Export and Reporting: For the final step of any investigation, proper are crucial exporting and reporting is necessary for legal procedures. Users can choose between two file formats, CSV and PDF, for their reports.
Conclusion
In this article, you get to know about the aspects of Outlook.com Email Forensics and a very advanced tool recommended by experts to use for this purpose. Read the article to make an informed decision about your Outlook.com Email Forensics tool and make your life easy.