eDiscovery Daily Blog

Searching for Email Addresses Can Have Lots of Permutations Too: eDiscovery Throwback Thursdays

Here’s our latest blog post in our Throwback Thursdays series where we are revisiting some of the eDiscovery best practice posts we have covered over the years and discuss whether any of those recommended best practices have changed since we originally covered them.

This post was originally published on November 15, 2012 – when eDiscovery Daily was early into its third year of existence and continues the two-part series we started last week.  Email addresses still provide the same opportunities and challenges for identifying documents associated with individuals that they did nearly seven years ago.  Enjoy!

Last week, we discussed the various permutations of names of individuals to include in your searching for a more complete result set, as well as the benefits of proximity searching (broader than a phrase search, more precise than an AND search) to search for names of individuals.  Another way to identify documents associated with individuals is through their email addresses.

Variations of Email Addresses within a Domain

You may be planning to search for an individual based on their name and the email domain of their company (e.g., daustin@cloudnine.com), but that’s not always inclusive of all possible email addresses for that individual.  Email addresses for an individual’s domain might appear to be straightforward, but there might be aliases or other variations to search for to retrieve emails to and from that individual at that domain.  For example, here are three of the email addresses to which I can receive email as a member of CloudNine:

To retrieve all of the emails to and from me, you would have to include all of the above addresses (and others too).  There are other variations you may need to account for, as well.  Here are a couple:

  • Jim Smith[/O=FIRST ORGANIZATION/OU=EXCHANGE ADMINISTRATIVE GROUP (GZEJCPIG34TQEMU)/CN=RECIPIENTS/CN=JimSmith] (legacy Exchange distinguished name from old versions of Microsoft Exchange);
  • IMCEANOTES-Andy+20Zipper_Corp_Enron+40ECT@ENRON.com (an internal Lotus Notes representation of an email address from the Enron Data Set).

As you can see, email addresses from the business domain can be represented several different ways, so it’s important to account for that in your searching for emails for your key individuals.

Personal Email Addresses

Raise your hand if you’ve ever sent any emails from your personal email account(s) through the business domain, even if it’s to remind you of something.  I suspect most of your hands are raised – I know mine is.  Identifying personal email accounts for key individuals can be important for two reasons: 1) those emails within your collection may also be relevant and, 2) you may have to request additional emails from the personal email addresses in discovery if it can be demonstrated that those accounts contain relevant emails.

Searching for Email Addresses

To find all of the relevant email addresses (including the personal ones), you may need to perform searches of the email fields for variations of the person’s name.  So, for example, to find emails for “Jim Smith”, you may need to find occurrences of “Jim”, “James”, “Jimmy”, “JT” and “Smith” within the “To”, “From”, “Cc” and “Bcc” fields.  Then, you have to go through the list and identify the email addresses that appear to be those for Jim Smith.  Any email addresses for which you’re not sure whether they belong to the individual or not (e.g., does jsmith1963@gmail.com belong to Jim Smith or Joe Smith?), you may need to retrieve and examine some of the emails to make that determination.  If he uses nicknames for his personal email addresses (e.g., huggybear2012@msn.com), you should hopefully be able to identify those through emails that he sends to his business account.

To summarize, searching by email address is another way to identify documents pertaining to a key individual.  The key is making sure your search includes all the email addresses possible for that individual.

So, what do you think?  How do you handle searching for key individuals within your document collections?  Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Sponsor: This blog is sponsored by CloudNine, which is a data and legal discovery technology company with proven expertise in simplifying and automating the discovery of data for audits, investigations, and litigation. Used by legal and business customers worldwide including more than 50 of the top 250 Am Law firms and many of the world’s leading corporations, CloudNine’s eDiscovery automation software and services help customers gain insight and intelligence on electronic data.

Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views held by CloudNine. eDiscovery Daily is made available by CloudNine solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscovery Daily should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.