Ways that Email can be Investigated and Used as Evidence?

Email is one of the most common communication mediums used for both official and personal needs such as banking, sharing files, sharing official messages, etc. However, email communication also becomes vulnerable to attacks. With this article, we will focus on some of the ways that email can be investigated and used as evidence. So, before proceeding further let us learn the architecture of email first in detail.

Email Architecture

When a user sends an email, it passes through many servers. The MUA is an application that allows users to send and receive emails. After sending the message from MUA, MTA receives the message and decodes the information of the header to determine the destination server and deliver the email. After this every time whenever MTA receives the email message it changes the header by adding data. And when the last email message is received by the MTA. It decodes and sends it to the receiver’s MUA and a person can see who receives the email message.

Now to learn the ways that email can be investigated and used as evidence. Here, we will discuss both manual and professional methods. Let’s understand each one of them in detail.

The Manual Method to Investigate Emails

Email forensics investigation teams analyze the content and source of emails as evidence. Investigation of evidence from emails involves various ways that email can be investigated and used as evidence such as:

• Header Analysis: Header analysis is the method in which investigators evaluate the metadata in the email header, which will help to identify the evidence. By analyzing the header of the email, the investigators will find the various email-related crimes such as email spoofing, phishing, email spam, etc.
• Server Investigation: In server investigation, an examiner can investigate the copies of delivered emails and server logs. In some cases, it involves the investigation of the whole email box related to the case and the server logs.
• Network Device Investigation: When a user deletes an email message, it becomes difficult to restore an email. In such cases, the investigator requires the log files created by network devices such as routers, firewalls, and switches to find an email message deleted by the user.

Software Embedded Analysis

When a user composes an email to someone. The message includes the email software used by the sender in the form of custom headers or the form of MIME content.

• Sender Mail Fingerprints: In sender mail fingerprints investigators get to know about the software and the version used by the sender. The received field contains the tracking information generated by the servers and the mailer field helps to identify the email software. By analyzing both fields, investigators find the software and version used by the sender.

However, if you try to opt for these manual approaches to find ways to investigate email. And used as evidence it will become a time-consuming task even if there is no surety of getting an accurate result.

Therefore, we recommend using software for investigation which gives fast and accurate results.

Users can Refer: Practitioner’s List for Top Digital Forensic Investigation & Analysis Tools

How Can Email be Investigated and Used as Evidence

The email forensics tool, MailXaminer is a professional software exclusively designed to investigate emails thoroughly. It is a proven software for email investigation, it gives 100% surety of accurate results and speeds up the investigation helping the officials to solve the cybercrime attack.

• Once you install the MailXaminer software on your system. Run the software and go to File >> New Case Option.

• Scan and add a file with multiple file-formats based on web-based or desktop-based.

• One can efficiently preview and analyze emails within the software.

• Easily analyze the Geo – Location of the image file attached to an email message.

• The software deals with analyzing the video attachments within an email message which consist of obscene content or not.

• The software lets users to visualize and analyze the links between the emails using link analysis feature.

• Allows searching an email with the help of suspected keywords.

• Search evidence in emails using the powerful advance search mechanism (General Search, Proximity Search, Regular Expression, Stem Search, Fuzzy Search, and Wildcard Search).

• MailXaminer is designed in such a way wherein users can avail various Hi-tech searches with logical operators like (AND, OR, NOT)

• Users can easily bookmark any forensic evidence from the emails.

• Export case in multiple file formats (CSV, EML, MSG, HTML, etc.)

What Do you Expect from MailXaminer?

• Easy to learn: The interface of this software is user friendly; it can make your work easier.
• Saves Time: It will reduce the amount of time in finding the evidence as it is very fast in processing accurate results.
• Easy Investigation: This software has the ability to ease your investigation with the help of its countless features.

Some Advanced Features Offered by MailXaminer

• Proper Case Management: Through the Case Management feature, an investigator can easily handle more than one case simultaneously. In this feature, there are multiple options like create a case, open case, import case, export case, save the case, and delete the case.
• Support Multiple Email Formats: This software was designed in a manner that can support multiple email formats including both desktop-based and web-based email services.
• Advance Search Mechanism: With this feature, a user can filter their search depending on the situation. This comes up with 6 types of different search options and can also use logical search operators (AND, OR, NOT)
• Support Multiple Languages: This software comes up in many languages like Korean, Japanese, English, Chinese, French, and Spanish.
• Geo-Location Mapping: This feature enables a user to find the exact location of the image attached to an email.

Last Words

Sometimes it becomes a challenging task for the investigating officers to find ways that email can be investigated and used as evidence. During the email investigation process. The foremost responsibility of the forensic examiners is to find the evidence in emails. And provide a higher level of privacy to the users. For this reason, MailXaminer helps the investigators easily find the evidence within the emails in a hassle-free way.