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Administrative deletion of emails in MS Exchange

  • 03-04-2013 12:11AM
    #1
    Stky10
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 1,165 ✭✭✭


    I work in a pretty big multinational. Today a secretary forwarded an email with sensitive information to the wrong distribution list, and so it got sent to probably thousands of people rather than the very limited list it was supposed to be sent to. Approx 20-30 minutes later the email vanished (ie not recalled) from my inbox again, which obviously had to have been done by an administrator.

    I'm just curious as to how clever the algorithm that does this is?. If I'd moved the email to another folder within my inbox or to an archive off the mail server would it still have managed to find it and delete it?

    (Nothing too sensitive was released, ie wage levels that everyone was on. I heard that happened before though in another office not too far away)


Comments

  • #2
    Capt'n Midnight
    Moderators, Recreation & Hobbies Moderators, Science, Health & Environment Moderators, Technology & Internet Moderators Posts: 94,366 Mod ✭✭✭✭Capt'n Midnight


    Exchange is a big database that also does email. This means that stuff like this is trivial.

    Single instance storage means is should only hold one copy of the email with multiple pointers to it regardless of which mailbox / folder it was in.

    Editing it would mean the draft would be saved as a new instance.

    Then again yes you can run rules based on subject / sender / content too which could ferret out it as long as you weren't worried about false positives. There's a whole eco-system of rules / scripts / programs to provide all sorts of features.


  • #3
    Stky10
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 1,165 ✭✭✭Stky10


    Ok.. makes sense that.

    I had the attachment open in Excel when the email was deleted by the administrator, but it had no effect on it. If they had wanted to, could they have managed to force close it via group policy or otherwise, and delete it from the temporary files cache on every client (nearly all Windows 7, possibly a few Vista still around too)?.


  • #4
    Capt'n Midnight
    Moderators, Recreation & Hobbies Moderators, Science, Health & Environment Moderators, Technology & Internet Moderators Posts: 94,366 Mod ✭✭✭✭Capt'n Midnight


    one of the shortest measures of observable time is the


    ohnosecond

    The split second between hitting the "send" button on the computer to send an email, and realizing that there is a serious problem with the email (such as using "reply all" instead of reply to sender, especially for an inflammatory email, or seeing a nasty grammatical mistake after the send button has been hit.


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