*Permanently* deleting e-mail

[beer]

Using Outlook with e-mail being stored in Personal Folders locally, how would you go about permanently deleting e-mails? I.E, so forensic teams cannot recover them. There are quite a few good pieces of software for eliminating other files but the security risk lies within e-mails that are embedded in a PST file.

 

[dakels]

If you were to delete your emails, then create a new account and import all your old ones, I would think that it wouldn't carry over traces of old deleted files. Not sure though. I have no idea how Outlook's coding looks like and if old information is still in the files. I know something is going on since if you notice if you delete your emails, your personal file sizes don't get any smaller usually. But, if you import your old records, you usually get smaller personal db files. anyways, I don't know a whole lot about that.

What are you trying to hide from forensic teams anyways? 😛
If they really want to they can always scan the records and HD's of your ISP, and also scan your HD with an electron microscope to recover old, deleted, or formatted information.

 

[EeyoreX]

Fire. And lot's of it. That'll keep your emails away from the forensic teams. Along with everything else... If you are worried about hiding things from a team of forensic scientists I think you are deluding yourself. Without total destruction I think they can likely get nearly anything with enough time and effort. And if a team of forensic scientists needs to be called in, you can bet they will not do a half-@$$ed job...

\Dan

 

[JackBurton]

How about keeping a separate box just for storing data you don't want the forensic team to see. Now when you here them banging on your door, reboot the box so that it boots off your floppy with gdisk.exe on it with the DoD switch. They ain't getting anything off that box if it completes. If they can retrieve anything, it will take them a long time. Long enough for you to get out of the country. 🙂

So what are you wanted for? 🙂

Really, why would a forensic team be looking for you?

 

[beer]

It's not for me. It's something i was asked to evaluate for a contract job. None of the solutions above are acceptable; the people involved would not be able to do anything remotely complicated, it would need to be an automated or two-click task.

 

[Bulldog13]

Large industrial sized magnet?

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

Originally posted by: EeyoreX
Fire. And lot's of it. That'll keep your emails away from the forensic teams. Along with everything else... If you are worried about hiding things from a team of forensic scientists I think you are deluding yourself. Without total destruction I think they can likely get nearly anything with enough time and effort. And if a team of forensic scientists needs to be called in, you can bet they will not do a half-@$$ed job...

\Dan

AFAIK it's pretty well accepted that if you write random bits to your hard drive 7x over, the data is _GONE_. Do it 20 times for good measure, that data's not going anywhere 😉

 

[hudster]

so, Elemental007, I assume we're talking about just deleting specific emails within a .pst file, not wanting to securely delete the entire .pst file, right? So these users want to be able to delete specific emails within outlook, with the assurance that no trace of those specific emails are able to be found...is that what you're getting at?

 

[Shalmanese]

It doesn't matter if you do it an infinite number of times, the tracks of your read and write head are slightly misaligned. Thus, when you do an erase, you always leave a thin sliver of data left. This can be retrieved with a Scanning Tunnel Microscope. However, the costs of such things run into the $100,000 per hour so I doubt that you would care. Generally, any commercially availible data wiper will do an adequate job.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: BingBongWongFooey

Originally posted by: EeyoreX
Fire. And lot's of it. That'll keep your emails away from the forensic teams. Along with everything else... If you are worried about hiding things from a team of forensic scientists I think you are deluding yourself. Without total destruction I think they can likely get nearly anything with enough time and effort. And if a team of forensic scientists needs to be called in, you can bet they will not do a half-@$$ed job...

\Dan

AFAIK it's pretty well accepted that if you write random bits to your hard drive 7x over, the data is _GONE_. Do it 20 times for good measure, that data's not going anywhere 😉

7 times was the standard about as many years ago. Search USENIX archives for a paper on deleting files. If you can't find it, PM me. I'll try to find a link 🙂

 

[n0cmonkey]

Write a plugin to get the overwrite functionality out of Outlook or Outlook Express.

 

[Mavrick007]

Store .pst file on cds, delete old .pst file and create new .pst file?

 

[beer]

Originally posted by: hudster
so, Elemental007, I assume we're talking about just deleting specific emails within a .pst file, not wanting to securely delete the entire .pst file, right? So these users want to be able to delete specific emails within outlook, with the assurance that no trace of those specific emails are able to be found...is that what you're getting at?

correct

 

[beer]

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey
Write a plugin to get the overwrite functionality out of Outlook or Outlook Express.

That's not really an option, sadly. Read my posts in this thread to idenifty the target clientete. I know nothing of VB or VBA.

 

[SwampsterFL]

Ya'll are missing the obvious . . . M$ e-mail was nerver intended to be secure, and there isn't much that will make it so.

May I humbly suggest that you use Eudora Mail 5.2. It is a free download (in the sponsored mode) and is self-contained. Therefor, it could be run from a CD. If you want total security, then use a CD-RW disk and then the mail and address book, etc. are able to be stored there with full functionality. These super-snoops can't find something on the HDD that was never there <G>.

Just as a dodge, set Outlook Express up with a dummy mail account (one that accesses an actual mailbox, but one that you never actually use and never publish its address). That way, when they check the system they see the account, they see no mail . . . and they go crazy trying to figure out how you totally removed all traces of your e-mail <VBG>.

 

[Shalmanese]

Well, if your system is writing to the swap file, then chances are its still being kept in RAM. Also, I would recommend a USB pen drive rather than a CD-RW. Much more convenient and you CAN make outlook write onto those.