Jane said:
Will copies of emails sent out through outlook or outlook express sit
in allocated disk space of your hard drive OR unallocated disk space?
Is it possible for web based client emails to be found on allocated
disk space of the hard drive?
What kind of information is stored on unallocated disk space ?
You should ask this question in a Microsoft Outlook USENET group,
as they will know how databases and the file system interact.
This is not really a hardware question as such, since the
right choice of OS and email tool can solve the problem.
The best answer I can find for this in a 5 minute search, is to
use the "Best Encryption" setting, available in Outlook 2003.
That stores the .PST file in encrypted form. Then, no matter
what box the message is in, inside the PST, the PST file cannot
be read with a text or hex editor. Whether the PST is being rewritten
to disk after every session, or the PST is growing in place, any image
left on the disk (in unallocated space) will still be encrypted.
Basically, you are relying on the strength of Microsoft's encryption
method, to prevent recovery of the text of the message. (Likely with
a back door available to any law enforcement body that asks.)
If Microsoft is careful, the plaintext of the message would only
exist in RAM, and would disappear after the computer is
shut off (not just standby suspend to RAM).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_e-mail_clients
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;286146
An alternative, would be to send email via a read-only operating
system. I can boot a Knoppix disk, and it only uses RAM to store
files. When the computer is turned off, any scratch or temporary
files are gone (but so are my settings). If you can find an email
tool that will run under a bootable Linux distro, that may provide
a degree of security so that the email cannot be found. (Knoppix
can "see" and mount FAT32 disks, but won't touch them unless
you specifically make an effort. Knoppix working storage is the
RAM disk.) Obviously, this is not a very convenient solution.
If this is a computer at your office, your IT staff may have
an email relaying device. And it might have copies of the email
on it. Perhaps even archived on a nightly backup. It is hard to
say how many places that email could be stored, on its path
from your desk, to the recipient.
If it is crucial that the message never be found, then a
mechanism other than email is one answer.
If you can find a "point to point" transmission method for
your message, then that eliminates all the middlemen (from at
least making casual copies). To protect all the copies of the
message that were created while you were editing and preparing
the message in the first place, you can get one of these - a
disk drive with encryption at the hardware level. Even if this
disk is opened with a can opener, and viewed with an electron
microscope, all the sectors on this disk are encrypted.
http://www.seagate.com/docs/pdf/marketing/po_momentus_5400_fde.pdf
Paul
