litsupport summary for the week ending on 7/27/08

A lot of important and useful information is posted to litsupport each week. The following is a distilled summary, in the form of questions and answers.


Q. What are the gotchas of converting .nsf to .pst?
A. One may desire to convert an .nsf (Lotus Notes) to a .pst (MS Outlook) file, most likely because of the wide availability of tools for .pst analysis. However, while the conversion tools may be good for practical use to get most emails, they may be problematic for eDiscovery. Here is a list of possible problems (but see the last item, which offers a viable solution):

1. Because Lotus Notes actually contain different views of the same message, it is possible to get a large number of duplicates;
2. Converting to .PST usually increases the size of the e-mail store and thus the charges;
3. "All Documents" folder does not always contain all documents, complicating the duplicates problem;
4. You may not get all e-mails and attachments;
5. The embedded attachments will be lost - no known tool transfers embedded attachments;
6. If you have a Domino server in house, then you can use the Microsoft Outlook connector for Lotus Domino. Place the NSF back on a Domino server, create all the necessary credentials along with it, download and install the Microsoft Outlook connector
   for Domino (need to have Notes installed also on the workstation since the connector uses the Notes.ini for the server connection information), set up Outlook 2003 with the connector, download the contents of the NSF to Outlook and export to a PST. Yes, it sounds like a lot of work, but if one already has an existing server, it's not that hard.
   
   

Q. Can MD5 hash be forged?
A.

1. It is mathematically possible, but for the purposes of eDiscovery this is irrelevant, because the information that the forger needs is not available to him;
2. On the contrary, MD5 is not reliable and can be hacked. Its hash collisions have been found using HashClash, a BOING distributed compute project. Fixes have been suggested, but switching to SHA is preferred.

This summary from the Litsupport Group postings created by the wonderful and talented members of the group has been culled by Mark Kerzner (mkerzner@top8.biz) and edited by Aline Bernstein (aline.bernstein@gmail.com).