Overview of Email in Viewpoint

Elite Discovery's Viewpoint platform has a relationship analyzer which can provide metrics on email data. In the analyzer, a list of domains is shown in the left pane, and a list of individuals is shown on the right. The respective tables will show how many outgoing and ingoing emails are available for each domain and individual.

Clicking on an individual name will pull up another pane which will have multiple tabs listing all of the email addresses associated with the individual; the email addresses of the individuals that this selected individual has exchanged messages with; and a line graph plotting the number of emails including the selected individual across a date range.

The analyzer will also create a circular schematic which shows how emails are exchanged between domains and individuals. Each domain is designated with a color on the outer rim of the circle. Hovering over the inner rim of the circle will make captions pop up showing a specific email address. Lines across the center of the circle visualize communications between different domains and users.

The relations map has blocks for each domain which are sized to reflect their proportion of emails in the system. It's possible to drill down to an individual email level with similarly proportioned blocks. Color coding is used to show how most of the emails for an individual have been coded for relevancy.

It's possible to QC the coding decisions by right clicking an individual block in the chart, and selecting 'Build View', an option which is available on the other tabs as well.

X.500 Emails

The Tip of the Night for June 23, 2016 discussed the familiar X.400 email format. This email format includes multiple fields which gives you additional information about the user:

John Smith <"c=US/o=Acme/ou=corp/s=Smith/g=john">

This is different than the standard SMTP email format: jsmith@acme.com . X.400 was an email standard developed by the ITU Telecommunication Standardization Sector. ITU originated as the International Telegraph Union, and has established telecommunication standards of many kinds. The SMTP email standard was set by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).

ITU also developed the X.500 email format, which has a directory structure similar to Active Directory. In contrast to X.400, X.500 will have a format like this:

o=OldCOmpanyName 1/ou=First Administrative Group/cn=Recipients/cn=Firstname.LastName

X.400 and X.500 email format are commonly found in messages exchanged between users on the same Exchange server. The administrative group for a X.500 email should be identified by an alphanumeric string. If you know the group code for a server, and you've collected email messages from custodians which all shared that server, searching for the group code is an easy to determine if you have any X.500 emails which might elude standard searches for email addresses.

A post here, shows how an X.500 email address is displayed in Microsoft Exchange.

Email threading in Gmail

You can use your Gmail account as an email threading tool. Two emails from another email account, one received in the inbox, and a second replying to the original email, when forwarded separately to a Gmail account, will be automatically threaded together.

Gmail will thread all emails that:

1. Have the same subject, recipients, and senders.

2. Were sent within one week of one another.

3. Have a reference header ID in common.