Outlook AttachView

One of the limitations of searching in Outlook is that your search results can't include a separate field that lists the attachments to the email messages. If you need to search through email archives and find & delete attachments of confidential documents produced to your firm without getting rid of the work product in the messages themselves, you can search for them using standard options in Outlook (see the March 5, 2016 tip) and using Kopf's Outlook Attachment Remover as noted in the Tip of the Night for March 18, 2016. However neither Outlook nor this add-in with provide a way of easily logging the attachments you're removing that cross references the messages they were removed from. For defensibility purposes, it's ideal to have a log of exactly what you've deleted.

Nirsoft has a solution and it's called, Outlook AttachView. See this web page, http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/outlook_attachment.html . This another great freeware utility from the Nirsoft people. It installs as a separate application, not an add-in for Outlook. As you can see from the options below it lets you select different Outlook profiles, and specify folders in any one Outlook profile. You can select a specific date range to search in, and limit searches to those from particular authors or recipients, or only messages with a specified string in the subject field.

As you can see from the results below, each attachment gets it own entry, cross referenced with an array of meta data fields in adjacent columns. This meta data can be easily copied out and saved in a spreadsheet.

Recover Deleted Emails with exMerge Utility

If you are trying to collect emails deleted by a user at a business that uses a Microsoft Exchange Server for Outlook, consider asking the IT department to install MS exMerge utility (also known as Mailbox Merge Program) which can be used to extract emails from Exchange's Dumpster which may retain copies of emails after a user has deleted the email from his or her Deleted Items folder.

exMerge also has specialized searching capabilities when it is being used to extract emails from source storage to a collected storage file. Data selection criteria can modified to exclude duplicates of emails already in a target store or use the newly collected version to replace the version already in the target store. Specific folders can be selected for collection, and collection confined to emails in a particular date range. It's notable the date range can either be set for the time at which messages were delivered, or the last time they were modified - an important consideration in electronic discovery. If a user went over old emails during a relevant time period, you can make a strong argument that they are more likely to contain responsive information.

Targeted searches can also be run in the subject field description and attachment file names. You have a 'sub string match, ignore case' option which will run searches for any subject field or file name which contains part of multiple specified strings.

Outlook's Hidden Query Builder

Most MS Office users have used Advanced Find in Outlook which allows you to choose individual Outlook mail, calendar, and contact fields to search for strings. Multiple fields can be added, but you don't have the option to structure Boolean searches among the fields. The results will have to include all of the selected values for each chosen field. However, Outlook has a hidden secret. It's called 'Query Builder'. You can activate it by making changes in the Windows Registry. However this can be tricky. When I follow online instructions on how to edit the registry, they do not lead to Query Builder being added in Outlook 2016 on my Windows 7 OS. Changes to the registry can also cause unwanted modifications to the operations of Windows. Instead try installing KuTools for Outlook. See link on this page. Scroll down to where it says, "Easily enable Query Builder with KuTools for Outlook".

KuTools contains many shortcuts which you may find helpful. To get Query Builder, go to Options on the KuTools ribbon, click on the 'Others' tab and simply check off the option for, "Restore 'Query Builder' tab in Outlook Advanced Find Dialog.".

Restart Outlook. If Advanced Find is not is not available on the ribbon menu go to File . . . Options, select Customize Ribbon, pick the All Commands, menu and add Advanced Find in a new group.

Compare this test search using the standard Advanced Find options, where the four selected fields must all have the chosen values . . .

. . . with these settings in Query Builder, where we pick all emails received last month OR those which refer to Enron in the subject that also both have someone named Smith blind copied and are sent to a person named Wilson.