Email Ediscovery Software
The best ediscovery software for small law firms and legal professionals.
Email is still king when it comes to communication, especially in the professional world. According to Statista, around 347 billion emails are sent daily in 2023. And those numbers keep increasing!
Why does this matter?
Because email produces such vast amounts of Electronically Stored Information (ESI), it’s usually a dominating component of legal proceedings and digital forensics—litigations, government investigations and Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. Many cases have been resolved after finding exonerating, or incriminating, data in email messages and their attachments. Unfortunately, legal proceedings relying on suboptimal email discovery tools usually take longer to complete and, in some cases, fail to produce the required data.
Don’t make that mistake! Whether you’re a small law firm, an ediscovery consultant, or part of a large IT team, choosing quality ediscovery collection software can make the difference between a favorable litigation outcome and an expensive fine or settlement.
This is why you should consider Aid4Mail an essential component of your ediscovery tools. It is based on years of expertise in the field of email processing. Expertise that began in 1999 with email parsing and led to the release of our first ediscovery collection tool in 2002. That’s way longer than all our competitors.
How does Aid4Mail compare to other ediscovery tools?
First of all, Aid4Mail only deals with emails and their attachments. But it can collect, process and produce mail from more mailbox formats and cloud-based accounts than other ediscovery software and platforms—Aid4Mail is an industry leader in this domain.
Secondly, Aid4Mail’s workflow is very different from ediscovery tools like Relativity, Nuix, and FTK. As its primary job is to collect, filter and convert emails, the whole process takes a fraction of the time needed by traditional ediscovery software. This is because:
- Once configured, Aid4Mail can operate without user intervention. There is no manual review stage to interrupt the streamlined workflow.
- Aid4Mail’s native pre-acquisition filter can significantly reduce the volume of data downloaded from remote mail servers like Microsoft Exchange, Office 365,and Gmail.
- With no review stage, Aid4Mail doesn’t need to build search indexes. This saves a lot of time and system resources.
As a result, you can process terabytes of email data, unattended from start to finish, fast and accurately.
Furthermore, since the whole process happens on-premises, you don’t incur any third-party charges for unnecessary data processed and stored. This can significantly reduce costs.
Although you can’t review email data directly in Aid4Mail, you can easily convert it to a searchable format using Aid4Mail. For example:
- PST, then review emails in Microsoft Outlook.
- Mbox, then review emails in Mozilla Thunderbird.
- PDF, then review emails in Adobe Reader.
- HTML, then review emails in your browser.
- CSV, then review emails in Microsoft Excel.
- Plain text, then review emails in a text editor.
If you’re not able to cull your email collection to a reasonable size, consider transferring Aid4Mail’s output into a comprehensive ediscovery platform (e.g. Relativity, Exterro, OpenText, etc.). In this respect, Aid4Mail is a great complement to established ediscovery software platforms.
Use a high speed ediscovery collection tool
Aid4Mail has been optimized for speed and stability. It can work through terabytes of data without user-intervention. In tests with locally-stored files, Aid4Mail performed 6 to 10 times faster than its competitors! For example, an email collection taking a week to complete with a competing solution would require just one day with Aid4Mail—a considerable time-saving.
With Aid4Mail Investigator and Aid4Mail Enterprise, you can run multiple processing tasks simultaneously, taking full advantage of your computer’s hardware and saving more time. For example, collect email accounts from multiple employees concurrently. Set the project up and let it run overnight so no time is wasted. This example is shown in the screenshot below.
Collecting email from your custodians’ cloud-based accounts is made easy with Aid4Mail Remote Authenticator, a free stand-alone utility that they can download and run without installation. It enables the account owner to grant Aid4Mail secure, temporary access to their email service or IMAP account without providing full login credentials and without having a copy of Aid4Mail.
Unrivaled ediscovery email search features
Collecting the right data and finding exonerating or incriminating information is crucial. Fortunately, Aid4Mail’s email search and filter features are second to none.
In addition to the basic folder filtering available in all editions, Aid4Mail Investigator and Aid4Mail Enterprise add date and keyword filtering, and the ability to create complex search queries. These can include:
- Fielded searches (including attachments and file metadata)
- Boolean constructs
- Comparisons
- Proximity search operators
- Deduplication
- Wildcards and Regular Expressions
- Externally-stored search lists (for large numbers of keywords or phrases)
- Stemming (up to 24 languages) and tokenization
Native pre-acquisition search is also available for mail services that support it, like Outlook (including PST files), Gmail, Microsoft 365 and IMAP. This can greatly reduce the amount of data Aid4Mail needs to process locally, speeding up the whole operation.
Collect email from most file formats and webmail services
Aid4Mail supports most popular email formats, mail apps, and webmail services, including PST files, as both input and output. When available, additional metadata can be added to email headers.
Output formats for manual review or producing evidence in court are also available. Many, like PDF, HTML, CSV and TSV, can be customized: Header fields can be included or excluded, Bates stamps inserted, and folder hierarchies and filenames tailored. HTML exports even provide an option to create an online viewer with email and folder selection, and a metadata search bar to filter the email list.
Here’s a full list of Aid4Mail’s supported source and target mail formats:
Source:
- Gmail / Google Workspace
- Microsoft 365
- Outlook profile / Exchange
- PST ¹
- OST
- OLM (Outlook for Mac)
- MSG ¹
- IMAP (for webmail)
- EML
- Mbox
- Maildir
- Mozilla Thunderbird
- Mozilla SeaMonkey
- Apple Mail (EMLX)
- Google Takeout
- Google Vault exports ²
- Mimecast exports ²
- Proofpoint exports ²
- MIME emails in any file ³
Target:
- Gmail / Google Workspace ²
- Outlook profile / Exchange ²
- PST ¹
- MSG ¹
- IMAP (for webmail) ²
- EML
- Mbox
- Mozilla Thunderbird
- Mozilla SeaMonkey
- PDF, PDF/A, PDF/X
- HTML
- CSV
- TSV
- XML
- Plain text
¹ With or without Outlook
² Aid4Mail Enterprise only.
³ Aid4Mail Investigator and Aid4Mail Enterprise only. The file must not be in a compressed or encrypted container (disk images and extracted unallocated space).
Preserve email evidence
Maintaining the integrity of email after conversion from one format to another is crucial to avoid claims of evidence spoliation or tampering. Aid4Mail’s email conversion engine is the most accurate on the market. It is fully Unicode-compatible and preserves more data, visible and hidden, than any of its competitors.
Visible data:
- To, From, Date and Subject fields
- Status information (Read, Replied, Starred, etc.)
- Message text
- Message formatting
- Diacritical marks / accented characters (like é, ô and ç)
- Non-Latin characters (for example 你好)
- Embedded images and other media
- Attachments and their filenames
- Folder/label hierarchy
Here’s an example of how much better Aid4Mail performs with visible data. Notice that it has no problem with the accented characters in the first line, the embedded image or the Chinese attachment name at the bottom.
Hidden data:
- Metadata in the email header
- Server relay information
- Digital signing
Email ediscovery made easy
Improve case completion with the help of Aid4Mail:
- Simple and intuitive user-interface.
- Hands-off processing. Large email collections can take hours or even days to process. Once you run a conversion in Aid4Mail, it will churn through the mail without any further intervention. If there’s a problem with an email, it will try again. If the email can’t be processed, Aid4Mail will save a backup, log the issue and move on.
- Command-line interface (CLI) in Aid4Mail Enterprise to automate email processing and integrate with other tools.
- Familiar search operators, similar to those used by Gmail and Microsoft 365 (Aid4Mail Investigator and Aid4Mail Enterprise only).
- Progress statistics and logs providing a detailed overview of the collection, filter and conversion processes.
- Accessibility features like high-contrast mode, zoom and keyboard-only navigation.
Options to avoid pre/post-processing and manual review. For example:
- Create PDF files directly instead of as a second step. You can have one email per PDF or combine them all together.
- Add Bates stamps to documents as they’re produced.
- Incremental processing: Run the same conversion multiple times and Aid4Mail can skip emails that have already been processed.
- Remove the envelope around Journaled emails.
- Split, combine or restructure mailboxes and folder hierarchies.
- Rebuild the folder hierarchy of Google Takeout and Google Vault exports.
- Create custom filenames using unique hashes, email fields, Bates numbering, case information and more.
It’s simply the best email parser for email discovery on the market.
Get help when you need it
We’re known for our customer support! All editions of Aid4Mail come with:
- Context-sensitive help with a description of each setting. Press F1 in Aid4Mail, and it will open in the right place.
- A comprehensive user manual, available in PDF and CHM formats for offline use.
- Knowledge Base articles on our website.
- Access to our award-winning helpdesk, which typically responds to questions within hours.
Flexible licensing options
Aid4Mail licenses allow you to process an unlimited number of mail accounts and files, whether in-house or external. You can purchase a one-year license, or three years at a reduced price. During the license validity period, you benefit from free software updates and our award-winning customer support.
On purchasing a license, you will receive an activation code that gets you up and running with Aid4Mail within minutes of making your payment. Once activated, trial mode is turned off and your license becomes tied to your computer and Windows login account. See our EULA for details on how this works.
If you need to run Aid4Mail on a computer that doesn’t allow Internet access, simply contact us for an offline activation code. There is no charge for this option but it offers less flexibility than online activation.
We also offer licensing options for running Aid4Mail in a virtual environment. Pricing is determined by the number of concurrent users plus the total number of users and installations. Contact us for a quote.
If you’re ready to buy an Aid4Mail license, visit our Buy Now page for pricing details and links to our online store.
To see a detailed feature comparison between the three Aid4Mail editions, check our Aid4Mail 5 feature comparison table in PDF format.
Try Aid4Mail for free
There’s lots more to Aid4Mail and the best way to discover its capabilities is to try it out. We offer a free trial version with no time limit and no obligations. Simply visit our Downloads page to get your free trial and start using it within minutes.
Why choose Aid4Mail?
We have been developing software since 1990. Our first email tool was launched in 1999 and Aid4Mail followed in 2005. So our experience in processing email data spans over two decades. Longer than all other forensic tools for email investigation!
All core functionality in Aid4Mail is developed in-house. This means that key features are tightly integrated and optimized for speed. We are in full control of our code, including major components like email parsing and conversion, the filtering engine and its search syntax, MAPI access to Outlook accounts, and even the IMAP protocol used to connect with services like Yahoo! Mail and AOL.
Important clients around the world are relying on our software. These include the US government and law enforcement agencies, top law firms, national libraries, prestigious universities, major banks, and international NGOs. Currently half of the Fortune 50 companies are Aid4Mail clients and the numbers keep growing. For confidentiality reasons, we do not disclose their names.
Client testimonials
Aid4Mail Rated 5 Stars at SourceForge!
An Aid4Mail user wrote on SourceForge. “I’m a litigation paralegal and a satisfied user of this product (various versions) for approximately 15 years. Over the years I have found this program to be a great timesaver for me as well as the attorneys I work with.” Read more user reviews here: Click to read more user reviews.
