Top 3 Forensic Recommendations for PST Tools
PST Forensic Tools now have a growing demand because Outlook uses PST files to store its data. A PST file, short for Personal Storage Table, is a file format used by Microsoft programs to store various items such as calendar events, contacts, and email messages. PST files serve as a local storage repository for data in these programs, allowing users to access their information even when offline.
Since the PST files have a large variety of data, forensic investigations are a tedious and complex task. You require special PST Forensic Tools for conducting a sound investigation. We have mentioned 3 of them for you in this article. Choose them according to your needs.
Top Recommendations for PST Forensic Tools
Following are the recommendations for the PST Forensic Tools
1.Outlook PST Viewer Tool:
This is a basic tool that can be used to view the contents of the PST file. It supports only the viewing and manual analysis of the PST Files. For more advanced features refer to the tools mentioned further in this blog. Here are some of its salient features:
- View Emails, contacts, calendars and any other data in the PST File on a dedicated preview screen.
- You can choose various preview options like MIME view, Hex View, Header view, HTML view etc.
- Detailed preview of the attachments is shown in the software. Due to this you can properly analyze the attachments for any potential evidence.
- You can scan and Identify corrupted PST Files.
- Shows email data in the original folder structure.
- Reliable and Accurate PST file viewing.
- View detailed previews of contacts, calendars etc.
- The tool works independently of the desktop application of Outlook so there is no need to install the MS Outlook desktop client.
2.Outlook PST Viewer Pro+:
This is a slightly more advanced version of the previous tool. Adding to the features of the previous tools, this tool supports more features like exporting the files in a forensic manner, splitting the exported files, date range searching etc. Keep reading for more details. Here are some salient features of that tool.
- Supports all the features that the previous tool supports
- Supports viewing multiple files simultaneously
- Various file viewing options like MIME view, Hex View, Header view, HTML view etc.
- You can also recover damaged or corrupt files in the emails. This ensures that every bit of data is analyzed.
- Multiple Export Options are supported like EML, EMLX, MSG, MBOX, PDF, PST etc.
- Search for specific emails in the file using the powerful search feature.
- Search files in a particular range of dates using the data range filter. This can help you analyze the data present only inside a specific time period.
- When you are exporting the analyzed data in a PST file, you can also split it to make the management of the reports easier.
- Specify individual naming conventions for the data to save your data with the desired naming conventions.
- This tool is backwards compatible with various MS Outlook versions like Outlook 2021, 2019, 2016 and other older versions.
- Print and scan the exported PST Files.
These are the tools that can be used in minor applications and not necessarily for forensic investigations in the court of law. Moreover, these PST Forensic Tools are for single users at a time only.
There is a much more powerful and capable tool that is purpose built for these kinds of applications. Be it internal company investigations or the investigations in legal matters, the following tool is the most trusted and feature rich option in the market.
3.MailXaminer
This is the most advanced tool in the market that automates the forensic analysis process. This is an all-rounder Email Forensics Tool which also accepts PST files. Using this tool you can perform in-depth Email Forensic Analysis. These are some salient features of the same:
- Multiple Case Building: You can build multiple cases at once in this software. This feature is very useful for the investigators that are working on multiple cases at once.
- Support for Different File Formats: This tool is the only one in the market that supports a large spectrum of file formats. Files of various formats are accepted which can help manage and analyze multiple types of evidence.
- Advanced OCR Capabilities: This is a very powerful feature. You can analyze the digital evidence present in image files using this feature. This converts the image file into an editable text file.
- Keyword Based Investigation: There are various options that analyze the data on the basis of frequency of occurrence and the relationship between the suspect and the keywords.
- Innovative Search Analytics Windows: Various features like word cloud, timeline analysis, link analysis and entity analysis help you to link the emails with users and provide some context to the investigation. Choose these options according to your needs.
- Multiple In-Built Search Options: There are various search options like General Search, Proximity Search, Fuzzy Search, Stem Search, Wildcard Search, and Regular Expression. This feature makes the searching and sorting of the evidence very easy and fast.
- Various Export/Extraction Formats: This software supports CSV and PDF file formats for reporting. Reliable and accurate reporting ensures admissibility in court proceedings.
These are the 3 best PST Forensic Tools in the market specially curated to your specific needs. Choose the tools according to the scale of your forensic operation to best manage the task at hand.
Conclusion
In this article, read about the best and expert recommended PST Forensic Tools available to you. Also learn about what is a PST file and how forensics are performed on them. Choose your tool wisely for your PST Forensics journey.