Compare Aid4Mail editions
Up to 10x faster than competitors, powerful filtering with Gmail search operators, AI integration, support for OST, OLM, and Mimecast formats, MIME file carving, cloud attachment collection, and lots more.
- Aid4Mail Converter: Focuses on email conversion and is very fast! Process an unlimited number of mail stores, from in-house or external sources, with a single license.
- Aid4Mail Investigator: All of Converter with additional forensic and eDiscovery features: powerful email filtering (including native), AI integration, MIME file carving, Bates stamping, Python scripting, and more.
- Aid4Mail Enterprise: All the Investigator features, plus support for archive exports from Mimecast and Proofpoint. With flexible licensing, it can be installed on a server and even run from a USB flash drive.
Read on to find which best suits your needs, or open our feature comparison table (PDF).
Aid4Mail Converter
Specialized in converting mail from one format to another, Aid4Mail Converter is extremely fast and accurate, ensuring that converted mail is identical to the original. It’s an ideal solution for preparing mail for ingestion into archiving, eDiscovery and forensic tools and can process unlimited mail stores (in-house or from external sources).
Aid4Mail Converter supports over 40 email programs and mail formats. These include Outlook formats (with or without Outlook installed), non proprietary formats like EML and mbox, many popular email applications like Thunderbird, and useful export formats like PDF, HTML, CSV, JSON, and XML.
It offers secure IMAP access to cloud-based services (webmail) and can access Gmail / Google Workspace (formerly G Suite) and Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365) accounts through their native APIs, the most secure and efficient method.
A remote authentication tool is included. It can be downloaded by any third party under investigation, or whose mail account you are processing on their behalf. The remote authentication tool enables an account owner to grant Aid4Mail secure, but temporary, access to a cloud-based email service or IMAP account without providing their full login credentials and without having a copy of Aid4Mail.
Other Aid4Mail Converter features
- Reliably download large IMAP accounts through effective error recovery protocol.
- Secure access to Gmail / Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Outlook.com and IMAP through OAuth 2.
- Accurately restore the folder structure, including Google Takeout files.
- Remove the email journaling envelope and add its metadata to the email header.
- Basic filtering: search by folder, and skip duplicates.
- Convert to popular formats like PST, MSG, EML, mbox, plain text, and more.
- Migrate to cloud providers via IMAP, Outlook Profile, and the Gmail API.
- Export emails as searchable PDFs with linked or embedded attachments.
- Convert to HTML and display emails in a browser with the included viewer.
- Fully customize CSV, TSV, JSON, and XML exports.
- JSON exports are optimized for analysis with AI tools.
- Extract email attachments.
- Flexible template-based folder and file naming with support for Bates numbering.
- Support for long file names exceeding 255 characters.
- Detailed progress information, conversion statistics, and logs.
- Works seamlessly with both 32-bit and 64-bit Outlook.
- Supports long file names exceeding 255 characters.
- Modern user interface with full Unicode support.
- Comprehensive User Guide.
Before deciding whether Aid4Mail Converter is right for you, please take a look at the two next editions. Their advanced features may provide real benefits to your work.
Aid4Mail Investigator
The same powerful conversion engine as Aid4Mail Converter with the addition of advanced features for digital forensics and eDiscovery. These include the integration of AI to filter, classify, and analyze emails.
Aid4Mail Investigator provides all the tools you need for preparing email evidence in legal proceedings, including criminal investigations, litigation, compliance and auditing, and freedom of information requests (FOI).
In addition to the regularly supported mail formats, Aid4Mail Investigator allows you to carve out MIME emails from uncompressed disk images, forensically-extracted space, and corrupted mailboxes. In fact, from any (non-compressed) file that contains MIME emails.
It can collect and search cloud attachments, that are linked to from an email but stored in the cloud, and their metadata. This edition also supports Google Vault (zipped Mbox files) as a source format to optimize collection from Google accounts.
Aid4Mail Investigator’s powerful search and filter features enable you to build complex search queries using the same search operators as Gmail and Microsoft 365, or using the power of AI.
You can search any part of an email including deeply embedded content, attachments and files contained within attachments. For example, text in a PDF file that’s contained within a ZIP archive, attached to an email that is itself the attachment of another email, can be found! You can even search for file metadata like EXIF and IPTC information contained in pictures.
Built-in filters allow you to cull redundant and irrelevant emails before review: In addition to skipping duplicates, you can target personal mail, excluding emails from mailing lists, bulk mail and notifications. Forensic professionals also have the ability to search unpurged mail (including Recoverable items in Exchange accounts).
Native filtering is supported for PST files and Gmail, Microsoft 365, Exchange and IMAP accounts. These filters are sent directly to the mail server software to carry out a pre-acquisition search server-side. This can significantly increase performance because Aid4Mail will only download and process emails that match the search results rather than the whole account.
Aid4Mail Investigator’s support for Python filter scripts enables even more detailed control. Extract and search text from images using Python OCR modules or use Python image analysis to detect nudity in photos. You can also use Python scripts to modify email content, for example obfuscating sensitive information.
Concurrent processing enables you to run multiple Aid4Mail sessions simultaneously. These can be totally independent conversions, or share the same source, target or both.
For example, you can merge emails from multiple sources into a single PST file, or split a single source file into multiple target files. Alternatively, apply multiple search criteria to a single mail store, saving the results in different folders within the same PST, all at the same time.
Other Aid4Mail Investigator features
- Search lists.
- Stemming and tokenization.
- Word proximity operators, wildcards, and regular expressions.
- Reorganize emails by account.
- Configurable Bates number and Bates stamp.
- Add missing metadata to target emails.
- Access public and shared folders and delegate accounts.
- Customize target folder and file names using Python scripts.
Before deciding whether Aid4Mail Investigator is the right choice, please take a look at our Enterprise edition below. Depending on your set up, it may be more cost effective and adapt better to your work environment.
Aid4Mail Enterprise
The ultimate Aid4Mail. It contains every feature in Aid4Mail Investigator and Converter plus a command-line interface (CLI) and additional mail formats for large-scale archival projects. It can also be installed on, and run from, a server.
With flexible, multi-user licensing options, Aid4Mail Enterprise is well suited to large-scale email processing in medium to large organizations. The license is tied to a computer, server, or USB drive rather than a seat, making it available to any number of users in your company. You can run it from a server or networked computer or from a shareable USB flash drive. This makes it an ideal portable solution in the field or the lab.
The command-line interface (CLI) enables you to seamlessly integrate Aid4Mail Enterprise into your work flow. Run it from scripts or batch files to automate email processing, or create your own user interface to customize the features available to end users.
Additional Archive Formats
In addition to all the mail formats offered by the Converter and Investigator editions, Aid4Mail Enterprise also natively supports the following two archival source formats:
- Mimecast (zipped EML SJF/EJF files)
- Proofpoint (zipped EML files)
These are both enormous exports, and usually contain unorganized mail from multiple users. They can take several days to migrate. However, Aid4Mail can do this completely unattended, providing significant savings both in time and financially.
In addition, Aid4Mail has the unique ability to reorganize the jumbled exports by email account, eliminating the need to reorganize them manually.
Why choose Aid4Mail?
Fookes Software has been developing software since 1990. Our first email-processing tool was launched in 1999 and Aid4Mail followed in 2005. So our experience in handling email spans over two decades. That’s considerably longer than most of our competitors.
All core functionality in Aid4Mail is developed in-house. This means that key features are tightly integrated and optimized for speed. We are in full control of our code including key components like email parsing and conversion, the filtering engine and its search syntax, MAPI access to Outlook accounts, and even the IMAP protocol used to connect with services like Yahoo! Mail and AOL.
Most of our competitors rely heavily on code and software libraries (DLLs) from third parties. Even for their key features! One product, for example, installs 663 third-party DLLs. This means they’re depending on the know-how of other companies instead of their own. As a result, our competitors have little or no control over code quality and security, performance optimization and bug fixes.
Aid4Mail is Swiss Made. It meets the high-quality standards that Switzerland is famous for.