Email is by far the most popular way to communicate, especially in the business environment.

In 2008, the average email traffic in the internet was around 210 billion messages per day. That is 8.7 billion (8,750,000,000) per hour, or 145.8 million (145,833,333) per minute or a vast 2.4 million (2,430,555) a second ! Now around 70% of these emails are advertising spam, malicious messages and carriers of viruses and other malware.

Emails offer a wealth of information, not usually known or visible to the average user. For example few people know that the sender's address can be faked, or that when you reply your message goes somewhere different then where you think it does. Emails carry information in their headers (a part not visible to the user, but easily accessible) that can provide information about the path the message followed to reach you, where the original sender is physically situated and if there are aliases used to mask the real identity of the sender.

Most companies use a mail client to handle their business email accounts. The most popular clients are Outlook and Outlook Express from Microsoft, Lotus Notes and Eudora. These clients save the message and all its associate details (and attachments) on a local computer with an option on leaving (or not) a copy on the mail server. However most people for their personal needs, use well established Web-based platforms, such as Hotmail, Yahoo, Lycos, GMail etc.

Strathclyde Forensics can help you recover deleted emails, investigate their origin, check them against reported fraud, and establish what kind of files were attached and sent out of your premises. We can also retrieve forgotten passwords (in most cases) and crack passwords of disloyal employees.