Digital Forensics and Investigation: Email Architecture Report, CS-663

This report examines the architecture of email systems within the context of digital forensics. It details the actors involved in email exchange, including users, message handling services, and administrative management domains, and their respective roles. The report breaks down the email architecture into key components, such as Message User Agents (MUA), Message Transfer Agents (MTA), and Message Delivery Agents (MDA), explaining their functions in the process of sending, receiving, and managing emails. It also covers relays, gateways, web servers, and mail servers. The report references several sources to support the analysis of email architecture and its relevance to digital forensics.

DIGITAL
FORENSICS AND
INVESTIGATION

How e-mail works

User Actors
Email is service of high distribution which involves many
actors playing several roles for accomplishing mail
exchange. The actors of the User are of four types:
Author
Recipient
Mediator
Return Handler

Message Handling Service Actors
It is responsibility of MHS actors for transfer of the
messages. Such actors could generate, look or moderate at
transfer data within message. Actors of MHS could be of
four types:
Originator
Relay
Gateway
Receiver

Administrative Management
Domain Actors
Actors of ADMD are associated to several organizations
having administrative authority of their own, decision
making and operating policies. ADMD actors could be of
three types:
Edge
Consumer
Transit

Email Architecture
Email system is combination of many software and
hardware components, protocols and services that provide
interoperability among users as well as between components
along transfer path.
Email system is composed of several components which
consist of client as well as server computers of the sender as
well as client and server computer of the receiver with
required services and software installed.

Email Architecture
Roles and functions of several components of email architecture are:
Message/Mail User Agent (MUA)
Message/Mail Store (MS)
Message/Mail Submission Agent (MSA)
Message/Mail Transfer Agent (MTA)
Message/Mail Delivery Agent (MDA)
Relays
Gateway
Web Server
Mail Server

References
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De Bruin, E. (2018). Preventing coups d’état: How counterbalancing
works. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 62(7), 1433-1458.
Tsipenyuk, G., & Crowcroft, J. (2017, March). My Home is My Post-Office:
Evaluation of a decentralized email architecture on Internet-of-Things low-end
device. In Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Internet of
things, Data and Cloud Computing (pp. 1-8).
Tsipenyuk, G. Y. (2018). Evaluation of decentralized email architecture and
social network analysis based on email attachment sharing (No. UCAM-CL-TR-
918). University of Cambridge, Computer Laboratory.
Umar, R., Riadi, I., & Muthohirin, B. F. (2019). Live forensics of tools on android
devices for email forensics. Telkomnika, 17(4), 1803-1809.
Chen, L., & Mao, Y. (2016, August). Forensic analysis of email on android
volatile memory. In 2016 IEEE Trustcom/BigDataSE/ISPA (pp. 945-951). IEEE.

Thank You
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