privacy question

[MDCrab]

hello,

for the last couple of years i've enjoyed being able to send and receive secure emails from work. we have our own Exchange 2003 server and the network admin is trustworthy.

however, now my company wants to outsource our email server to a third party vendor. This is causing me anxiety because i don't want the new vendor to have the ability to read past emails.

my question is if I have deleted the old emails (i.e., purged them from the sent, inbox and deleted folders), can an Exchange Administrator still go into a person's mailbox and read messages that were sent or read months before? in other words, does Exchange keep a copy of every email that was ever sent or received so that an Administrator could possibly read it? Or, is the current contents of a person's mailbox all that an Administrator can see?

thanks.

 

[zbnet]

If the server has Deleted Items Retention on (you can't tell just by looking at Outlook) then any message that is normally deleted can be retrieved from the dumpster for that length of time. This is true even of shift-deleted items. The only way to force this to disappear is to purge the dumpster for your mailbox (which is done from Outlook).

But even if you do that, you can't be sure. Anyone with access to past backups can restore the backups to the recovery storage group on the Exchange server, and see old messages. And there may also be an archive of previously sent items on the SMTP connector, or even on a 3rd party SMTP smarthost, either at the network DMZ, or even at the ISP.

If your question is does the information store of the server keep copies of old email, then in theory no, email is marked as over-writable once all links to the content are deleted and the deleted item retention period expires, but the space is only marked as reuable, and will only actually be reused when new mail over-writes it. But retrieving 'deleted' email from a store would need specialist knowledge of the db internals, so you can essentially consider the store unreadable in its native format.

 

[MDCrab]

hi zbnet,

thanks a lot for the reply. that relieves my worries.