Teaching forensics? Use Aid4Mail for free!

Finding the right forensic software products for use in the classroom can be challenging. In most cases, teachers are limited to open-source solutions due to cost considerations. Unfortunately, these typically have limited capabilities or are not widely used in the professional world.

If you’re lucky, you might benefit from a free software license from a well-established vendor. But these deals often come with restrictions that severely limit access to the software.

Why use Aid4Mail?

So why should you consider a commercial product like Aid4Mail? Two reasons:

1. You can run it indefinitely, with very few limitations, on as many computers as you like, without purchasing a license! More on that later…

2. Aid4Mail is a leading software solution for collecting, converting and investigating email. No other product comes close to its capabilities.

Email is still important in forensics

Although email no longer dominates communications the way it used to, the volume of data it generates continues to grow. As a result, email remains an essential source of information in digital forensics.

There’s lots of free, email-related, source material available for the classroom. A number of high-profile mailboxes have entered the public domain following FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests, leaks and data breaches. These include large email data-sets from Enron, ClimateGate, and Podesta.

By using Aid4Mail in combination with this free email data, you have access to high-quality, low-cost teaching materials that cover many aspects of forensic investigation: collection, search and filtering, data culling, conversion and data extraction.

The secret of Aid4Mail’s trial mode

So how does Aid4Mail provide teaching advantages over other commercial products? The secret lies in its trial mode. It’s restrictive enough that it can’t be used professionally but not in a way that inhibits its use as a teaching tool.

Working with Aid4Mail in the classroom

None of the trial-mode limitations impede using Aid4Mail in the classroom. You can still develop fully-working exercises for your students. Just keep in mind 3 simple trial-mode limitations:

1. Subject lines are truncated to 20 characters and the following text is added:
   [Created with Aid4Mail in trial mode].
2. The sender email address is replaced with: trial-mode@aid4mail.com
3. Attachments, and sometimes embedded contents, are removed from emails that exceed 1 MB (Aid4Mail Enterprise and Aid4Mail Investigator) or 10 MB (Aid4Mail Converter).

That’s all!

Download Aid4Mail for free

Aid4Mail in trial mode includes all editions of the software. For the classroom, we recommend setting it to Aid4Mail Investigator if you need to use search and filter features, or to Aid4Mail Enterprise if you need to run from a server or USB flash drive.

P.S.: If you’re looking for high-quality teaching materials, we highly recommend the “Electronic Evidence Workbook” by Craig Ball. You can download it for free from:
http://www.craigball.com/Ball_Workbook_latest.pdf