Applications of IDEA - Auditing E-mail Logs
E-mail logs generally contain information such as the sender and recipient address, subject title, date and time of transmission, size of file, service provider etc. Ensure the organisation has a published policy related to employee use of e-mail before undertaking any of these tests.
Common tests include:
- Total length of time spent on e-mails (receiving and responding) by organisation as a whole, by individuals, by month
- Analyse internal and external e-mails
- Summarise by service providers
- Summarise numbers of e-mails by employee, sort in order
- Isolate, summarise and examine personal e-mails
- Stratify by time and examine any unusual activity e.g. lunchtime, weekends, bank holidays
- Stratify by size of files
- Analyse file attachments, by size, by type
- Analyse incoming e-mails, identify common domain addresses
- Calculate length of time individuals spent on e-mail in given time period, sort in order
- Match with list of employees and extract any e-mails that are sent by invalid employees
- Analyse any dormant accounts
- Identify non-work related e-mails by searching for specific words in the subject title e.g. weekend