Compare Aid4Mail editions
Up to 6x faster than previous versions, powerful filtering with Gmail search operators, support for OST, OLM and Mimecast formats, MIME file carving, simplified licensing, and lots more.
- Aid4Mail Converter focuses on email conversion and is very fast! With this license, you may process an unlimited number of mail stores, whether in-house or from external sources.
- Aid4Mail Investigator uses the same engine as Converter and adds powerful email filtering (including native), MIME file carving, Bates stamping and Python scripting.
- Aid4Mail Enterprise includes all the Investigator features, offers additional source and target formats, and can be installed on a server or run from a USB flash drive.
Read on to find which best suits your needs, or open our feature comparison table (PDF).
Aid4Mail Converter
If all you need is to collect and convert email, then Aid4Mail Converter is for you. It’s an ideal solution for preparing mail for ingestion into archiving, eDiscovery and forensic tools. What’s more, you can use it to process unlimited mail stores, whether in-house or from external sources.
This new edition is very fast—up to 6 times faster than its predecessor! Remarkable considering Aid4Mail 4 is already one of the fastest email converters on the market. And this speed gain is without sacrificing accuracy.
Incremental processing has also been significantly improved. It’s simple to use and makes it quick and easy to continue a prior conversion where you left off, or to capture any new mail received since last time.
Two frequently requested file formats have been added: OST (Offline Outlook Data File) and OLM (Outlook for Mac Archive). What’s more, you can now process PST and MSG files without having Outlook installed. And PST to PST migrations are now fully supported.
And that’s not all. Aid4Mail can now access Gmail, Google Workspace (formerly G Suite) and Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365) through their native APIs using secure OAuth 2 authentication. We’ve also developed a free remote authentication tool. It enables anyone to grant temporary access to their Microsoft 365, Gmail, Google Workspace or IMAP account. This can be done securely, without providing login credentials, and without an installation of Aid4Mail.
Of course, there’s also support for loads of other popular formats like: Outlook profiles, secure IMAP for cloud-based services (Yahoo!, AOL, iCloud …), Mozilla Thunderbird, Apple Mail, Maildir, mbox and EML.
More features
- Reliably download large IMAP accounts through an effective error recovery protocol.
- Secure access to Gmail, Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Outlook.com and IMAP through OAuth 2.
- Accurately restore the folder structure from Google Takeout files.
- Option to remove email journaling envelope.
- Export emails as searchable PDF files with linked or embedded attachments.
- Convert to HTML and display emails in any browser.
- Plain text, CSV, TSV and XML target formats.
- Extract email attachments.
- Flexible template-based folder and file naming with support for Bates numbering.
- 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 Help manual.
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
If your work involves email forensics or eDiscovery, or you need powerful email search and filter capabilities, then Aid4Mail Investigator is ideal. It includes all the benefits of Aid4Mail Converter with additional tools to find relevant emails. It also accelerates email processing even further.
The new filtering capabilities in Aid4Mail Investigator far exceed those in Aid4Mail 4. And they’re more user-friendly, offering the same email search operators as Gmail, Google Vault and Microsoft 365. You can now search any part of an email including attachments and deeply embedded contents. Even file metadata like EXIF and IPTC information contained in pictures.
Suppose you’re searching for text in a PDF file that’s contained within a ZIP archive, attached to an email that is itself the attachment of another email. Aid4Mail 5 will find it!
You’ll find helpful filter operators to skip duplicates, emails originating from mailing lists, bulk mail and notifications—essential tools to cull redundant and irrelevant emails before review.
If you need more advanced search features, Aid4Mail gives you full control through Python scripting. Extract and search text from images using Python OCR modules. Or use Python image analysis to detect nudity in photos. The possibilities are endless…
Aid4Mail Investigator also supports native Gmail, Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, IMAP and MAPI filtering for even faster results—only emails matching the query are downloaded by Aid4Mail. This feature alone results in significant time and cost savings.
Aid4Mail adds a forensic carving tool that can extract MIME data from any kind of file, including:
- Uncompressed disk images (DD, E01, AFF, …)
- Forensically-extracted unallocated disk space
- Mailbox formats not officially supported
- Corrupt mail files
The carving algorithm works without relying on a file’s internal structure, the disk image’s Master File Table (MFT) or data placement markers. The only requirements for successful retrieval are:
- The email is in MIME format (even if incomplete)
- Its MIME parts are stored contiguously and sequentially
- It is not stored in a compressed or encrypted container
Another key feature for forensic investigations is access to unpurged emails in mbox files, IMAP accounts and “Recoverable items” in Exchange accounts (e.g. Microsoft 365, Outlook.com). Aid4Mail Investigator is able to extract emails that have been deleted—even after an account’s Trash folder has been cleared (but before a purge operation). This capability is invaluable to recover clues that a custodian may have tried to destroy.
Last but not least, you can speed up processing even further by running multiple conversions simultaneously. These can either be totally independent conversions, or share the same source or 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. Or 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 features not mentioned above
- Process native Google Vault exports, including cloud attachments and metadata.
- Reorganize emails by account.
- Add missing metadata to target emails.
- Access Public and Shared folders, as well as Delegate accounts.
- Use word proximity operators, wildcards, and regular expressions in your queries.
- Configure Bates stamping format through a large range of settings.
- 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 most advanced and complete email processing tool we’ve ever developed. Aid4Mail Enterprise has all the features you need for email conversion and archiving, email migration, email forensics and eDiscovery. It is well suited for large-scale email processing in medium to large organizations.
Aid4Mail Enterprise combines all the benefits of Aid4Mail Converter and Investigator together with flexible licensing that make it a very cost-effective solution.
An Aid4Mail Enterprise license is tied to a computer, server, or USB flash drive instead of a seat. This makes it available to any number of users in your company. You can run Aid4Mail Enterprise from a server or networked computer or from a shareable USB thumb drive. This makes it ideal as a portable solution in the field as well as in the lab.
Aid4Mail Enterprise also supports these additional email formats:
- Source formats
- Mimecast (zipped EML SJF and EJF files)
- Proofpoint (zipped EML files)
- Target formats
- Microsoft 365 and MS Exchange (via MAPI)
- Gmail and Google Workspace (via Google API or IMAP)
- Dovecot, Courier, Zimbra, … (via IMAP)
You also gain access to a command-line interface (CLI). This allows you to seamlessly integrate the Aid4Mail engine directly into your workflow. Use it in scripts and batch files to automate email processing. Or create your own user interface to limit the features available to your end users.
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.