In the more recent past, legal teams have often chosen to use an eDiscovery vendor to do the dirty work of collecting, reviewing, and producing email data.
For today’s world, manual review is sorely behind the times. Furthermore, the process is particularly likely to result in accidental data spoliation- the destruction of evidence- or the corruption of metadata. However, in cases with larger amounts of relevant data, manual review becomes almost impossible. Manual review such as this is sometimes still used today for cases in which there are only a dozen or fewer documents to review.
Now that you’ve obtained your data by downloading it from Apple, the next step is to review it- arguably the most arduous and labor-intensive part of the eDiscovery process.īefore eDiscovery software became available, most legal teams did review by hand- physically printing out each document and poring over it with sticky notes and a permanent marker, organizing by using file folders and spreadsheets. Reviewing Data from Apple Mail and iCloud MBOX files can then be downloaded onto a USB, and/or uploaded to a document review software. MBOX, which stands for “mailbox,” is a type of standardized text file commonly used for storing emails, which will show your data as plain text separated by headers. This will make a copy of your entire iCloud mailbox, including every folder and message, and save it as an MBOX file in the destination of your choosing.
Don’t miss our overview on how to collect email data for discovery across a wide number of common platforms. This post is part of our “How to Export and Review” series.