Extracting email from Zimbra is not all that challenging. These simple steps show you how.
Zimbra is one of the most popular enterprise-class email, calendar, and collaboration solution. It is cloud-based but can also be treated as a standard POP3 mail server. Zimbra offers a web-based interface for users and can be held in a personal or corporate cloud.
Zimbra can be supported with the following specifications.
Cloud Platforms
The following Cloud Platforms are supported:
- Oracle Cloud Infrastructure as a Service New
- VMware vCloud Director
- VMware vCloud Air
- Image editing can be undone (cropping, rotation, etc.)
Virtualization Platforms
The following hypervisors are supported:
- VMware vSphere 4.x
- VMware vSphere 5.x
- XenServer 6.2
- XenServer 6.5
- KVM
Operating Systems
The following Operating Systems are supported:
- Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® 7 (64-bit)
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 (64-bit), patch level 4 or later is required
- Oracle Linux 7.2
- Oracle Linux 6.6
- CentOS Linux® 7 (64-bit)
- CentOS Linux 6 (64-bit), patch level 4 or later is required
- Ubuntu 14.04 LTS Server Edition (64-bit)
- Ubuntu 12.04.4 LTS Server Edition (64-bit) running the saucy (3.11) or later kernel is required
With Zimbra being cloud-based, you do not tackle it for forensics at the server itself. Instead, you can deal with each mail archive separately. This is a great option when the discovery of email processing might be limited to a single custodian.
If you go into Zimbra and select the following options you will be provided with an offline backup of the mail archive associated with that account:
Exporting all account data:
– Go to Preferences>Import/Export
– In Export, select the Type as Account
– Make sure Source displays All folders.
– Click Export.
– In the dialog that opens, select Save File and select where to save the file.
The account data is saved as a tgz file.
The .tgz file is an archive which you can extract and add folders with emails as Email file evidence (E3/Add Evidence/E-mail database/Email file).
There is also an option to convert Zimbra mail files into PST files using 3rd party tools. You can see more details on this option here:
We made the support of Zimbra mail even easier in the 1.7 version of the E3 Platform with a quick parsing of the mail archives.
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