Email Forensics – An Art of Extracting and Examining Email Evidence

Generally, a bunch of Email forensics investigators engrosses themselves in the practice of analyzing and gathering data related to e-mail investigation.

Most organizations have precise e-mailing policies implemented. However, sometimes it is not enough to prevent the e-mail from being violated. This, in turn, gives rise to the need for proper monitoring and investigation of the emails which is the best handling by email forensics. This study of email messages helps to investigate suspected e-mail accounts to gather evidence for prosecuting a criminal in front of legal authorities.

How to Extract Email Data Scientifically?

Some fornicators favour reading emails from the bottom while some of them prefer to read them from the top down. However, the best thing to do is to just go through the header section, where all the crucial information is placed by the MUA (mail user agents). Any email forensics expert’s first attempt is to use the metadata to understand what kind of activities took place in the e-mail(s). Unfortunately, metadata fields don’t always reveal the expected results. As the suspect can hide, manipulate, or make inaccessible. Criminals make an effort to purge/tamper with the metadata, with the intention of covering their tracks.

A number of portions in an email, if investigated properly can ease the task of examining emails for investigators or technocrats to a large extent. These portions act like artefacts in a case as they hold potential pieces of evidence, a few of them are; email header forensics, email metadata forensics, email spoofing forensics, and the hexadecimal value of an email, email hop path, properties of an email, etc. Many tools are available online with advanced features to target such artefacts and make the procedure of evidence extraction easier.

Basic Merits of this Email Investigation Tool

• Analyze Calendar data item
• Option to search Subsets in deep
• Decrypt SMIME / OpenPGP Email
• Email Data sort and filter option
• Support multiple email file format
• Logical operators for the powerful search mechanism
• Image analysis using AI
• Tagging of email messages
• Option for case management
• Multi-Language support of software
• Multiple email data saving options

What Benefits Do These Artifacts Hold?

There is a lot more benefit that can be provided by real and efficient forensics tools. This tool has many advanced functions that make it extraordinary.

1. Advanced Link Analysis To detect the relationship between multiple emails connected together.
2. Timeline Analysis To display the frequency of emails by Year, Month & Day in a Graphical Structure.
3. Word Cloud Analysis A visual representation of the frequency of words used within the email message.
4. Geolocation Image Mapping To track image location information like Latitude, Longitude & Altitude.
5. Entity Analysis To find words in an email, specifically, location-oriented (Country, State, etc.) with its usage frequency.
6. Advanced OCR (Optical Character Recognition) To search image content or keywords from attached files in email.
7. Skype Database Analysis To find direct/indirect communication via calls, chats, etc.

To know more benefits of the Scientific Email Forensics tool, see the following section. Email Extraction is a very complex task that needs lots of precision and professionalism. See, what is the additional information to be checked while doing Email Analysis in a wider range.

Professional Email Extraction and Investigation

• If an investigator needs basic information about an email like at what time it was sent or received or the kind of content within for that purpose a normal view of the email would work. That describes the email content along with its properties and metadata cc, bcc & date-time information.
• To ascertain if any email data or header information has been compromised with or manipulated by the suspect, its hexadecimal coding can be checked. This way an investigator can view and analyze the binary format of emails and easily catch the changes as well as do the mapping of characters from hex code.
• With the advancement in the technology sector, additional types of information in email messages increase the workload for fornicators. Currently, most messages support the MIME version, studying which may reveal a lot about the suspect email. Hence, examining the header part of the email is the probable way to reach such information including; MIME version; message ID, content type, To, Bcc, From, Sender address, etc.
• Each and every section of the email stores strong shreds of evidence. Taking a look at the path followed by an email to reach a mailbox helps reveal directed gateways, routers, and switches. Which helps in studying the entire path of an email from the source to the destination.

How do Commercial Tools Help In Email Forensics?

Commercial utilities available for evidence analysis to be performed on emails increases fornicators’ chances of optimizing their study with facilities like; examination of different sections in an email, searching for a particular set of conversation, fetching the attachments, etc. In addition, as part of an investigation, a fornicator cannot skip following the basic stages of performing email forensics analysis which includes; documentation, analysis, reporting, etc.

Also, external tools offer evidence export facilities to fulfil the need of reporting the investigation in the form of evidence carved out in a case. Further, an investigator can use this output. To share copies of potential pieces of evidence with fellow investigators for a cross-check and feedback on them.

Conclusion

Thus, commercial programs play a vital role in conducting email forensics examinations in an organized and accurate manner. No matter how proficient an investigator is speed along with precision during an email examination can be attained using commercial tools only.