I had a quick Twitter exchange with the author of NodemailerApp yesterday and started looking into it. Very interesting free tool with built-in SMTP and POP servers, IMAP upload capability, and a functional email viewer.
Something that caught my attention right away is that it can ingest a folder of EMLs or an mbox file (e.g., Takeout), lets you review the emails, filter them by date ranges or other criteria, export them to PDF individually, or export search results to mbox!
While not a replacement for a forensic investigation tool, this could come in handy to take a quick look at an email collection or to narrow it down post-acquisition in a pinch.
Thanks for the mention! I started building the app when I received a 10GB mbox file from Google Takeout and was not able to figure out what exactly to do with that thing. So I took all my existing utility scripts and bundled these into a desktop app.
In addition to all the things you already covered, I’d also mention Postfix queue file support. These are the files in Postfix outbound queue folder that are either emails not yet delivered or are deferred. Usually you can only open these with the postcat command but if you do not have Postfix installed (and installing it just to get postcat is far from easy) then there’s not much you can do with these files. And by the way, NodemailerApp stores all available metadata as well (SMTP envelope addresses for Postfix files, folder paths and flags for Maildir files etc.), this data is not shown anywhere but it is there.
Very cool, Andris! Many thanks for making the tool available and also for joining the conversation here.
If I may make a feature request (or two), something that would make the tool much more useful to me would be the ability to bookmark/tag individual messages. Also, when ingesting a folder full of EMLs recursively, it would be great if the file paths could be displayed in some manner—for instance, in a tree view.
NodemailerApp is very interesting as it is; I am just thinking about how we could use it in the legal context
Good ideas. I did a release (v1.0.13) with the following changes:
Email view has a new tab “Metadata”, you can find the imported filename and other information from there
Email info has new field for editing custom labels. Once set these labels can be used for filtering messages. You can see the editing feature here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T95M0Ohuok0
NodemailerApp has auto-updates built in, so if the app has been opened for some time, then it probably already updated itself. Restarting the app enables the new version (active version number can be found from File -> About NodemailerApp).
Just had a chance to play with 1.0.13 and it looks great! Looking forward to putting NodemailerApp to good use. Thanks for the speedy update, Andris!
I really like that once you ingest the emails, NodemailerApp shows you the contacts and any attachments in separate tabs. You can double-click a contact to list all the messages where that contact was a participant or double-click an attachment to open it. Very handy for impromptu email review
As Arman notes, NodemailerApp looks very useful for QA on eDiscovery projects and peeks into data exported from sources like Google Vault and Takeout - thank you, Andris!
My feature requests would be to add a date column and make the columns sortable.
