The company I work for is in the middle of a legal dispute. As part of the dispute we have been asked to provide all emails SENT TO or RECEIVED from a list of 141 individuals during a 4 month time span.
There are about 12 people in the company, we use Outlook 2010, and our mail is hosted Exchange. The hosting company said they cannot help us, other than to export all our mail to PST and send to us, which doesn't seem like much help at all. They also said it would take "a few days" to give us the exported PST files. We have to provide the applicable messages to the lawyers in 2 days so we have to do something now.
Is there a fast or scripted way to search and extract messages from our OST files?
As it stands, it seems like we will have to perform two manual searches per name:
One search for messages FROM the person then a search for mail TO the person times 141 names. That's 282 searches per user, times 12 users. The searches are not quick either, since users have about 4-6 GB OST files.
What would you do in this situation? Am I out of luck?
Best Answer
As Jason pointed out, normally this kind of request is satisfied by tools run directly against the Exchange server. Parsing through the PST/OST files is a vastly more complex task, and is largely manual as pointed out by joeqwerty.
Commercial solutions exist for this kind of thing. They are not free, and the complexity of doing this kind of thing is why they are not free. You're looking for eDiscovery tools, which is the industry I work in now. Pricing industry-wide is generally by the gigabyte.
With only 12 users of data to sort through, manual methods are within the realm of reason. It'll be a couple of long days, but it can be done. However, if the searches required are too diverse (those 141 names are each in their own email domain) you may have to outsource the searches to meet your deadline.