Three Esoteric Email Recovery Methods

A simple series of case studies of recent challenging email recovery experiences at the Schlesinger Library. Zachary Maiorana showed us three examples of challenging email acquisitions and discussed how they went about recovering the media to a usable state.

The first, the Papers of Rosalyn Koo, includes a series of emails, originally written in Simplified Chinese, that present in ePADD with rows of warped hex encoded characters. Maiorana discusses a web app that permits decoding SC email bodies.

Second, Maiorana discusses a case where the email of the Papers of Candida Royalle came to the library as a backup of an email export from a legacy version of Outlook for Mac. Maiorana discusses how they examined the data, about 100,000 emails stored as “olk14message” files. The preservation solution involved a simple Python script to delete the first 20 bytes of each email file.

The third involves the recovery of AOL IMAP mailboxes for a recent archival acquisition. There isn’t much information on how to do this, and options for email clients for AOL are less common than one might think. Aid4Mail offers this as a service, but Mairoana found a free email client that permits recovery to EML.

SLIDES

This session is part of Lightning Talks Session 1 and begins at 18:15