The evolution of Exactus started while I was in the midst of testing for the 2006 processing report. I noticed that there was indeed an accuracy issue with loading e-mail stores into a processing program. The larger an e-mail store the greater likelyhood of much different document counts in the loading stage. This was perplexing. The main culprit involved were embedded items. Could a program properly read them and then extract them? Each program was different. Some were able to extract certain documents and unable to extract and read others. A few of the processing applications in 2006 could not read embedded items at all. What is an embedded item? It can be an embedded e-mail, attachment or object. Nor could some of these same processing applications read container files within container files.
This left a user in a horrible situation. Because they are assuming that their processing application will be able to load all e-mails and attachments in an e-mail store. The bigger an e-mail store the more likely documents would not be loaded. Yes, some of these processing programs are better than they were in 2006. Recently, I created a small sample .PST file that had embedded e-mails, attachments and objects as well as container files within container files and deep nesting. Not one program was able to read and extact everything in this .PST file. The highest score so far is 84%. The problem is not that an edd processing application cannot extract all documents. The problem resides in the fact that an error log does not include every document that was not able to be extracted. I wanted to see an error log show the rest of the document that could not be loaded. Most programs cannot recognize attachments in a .PDF file. This is a problem. Some cannot extract or read embedded objects in Microsoft word documents.
Instead of always preaching about best practices I went out to try and solve the accuracy issue with .PST files. This started with contacting an IT software company and we went to work on a .PST reporting tool. The goal was simple to create a program that would be able to read everything in a .PST file including embedded e-mails, attachments and objects. To also drill down to N levels where other programs could not. The reasoning being for a user to load a .PST file into this program and get the total document count and then load the .PST into their processing application and see what the difference is. Why? Because anyone processing electronic discovery has to be accountable for the data. They need to know if a program can or cannot load every single e-mail and attachment. This will give a user a good start into what files are not being loaded and why.
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