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Extracting and Printing Attachments from Email Portfolios

By Rick Borstein

Electronic Discovery (ED or EDD) is the use of electronic information as part of the discovery process.

Acrobat 9 includes an email archiving feature which allows you to convert email in Outlook and Lotus Notes into a PDF Portfolio. This process is known as Email Archiving.

If my email inbox is any indication, more and more law firms are starting to use Acrobat to harvest and review email and folks have questions about working with the email attachments which are part of the production.

To start, please review my earlier post, Creating Email Portfolios for Small EDD Productions which tells you how to use Acrobat to harvest and review email.

Understanding the Email Portfolio Format

Before we dive in, it is helpful to understand how an Email Portfolio works.

Structurally, an Email Portfolio is a multi-tiered storage format:

Thus, an Email Portfolio contains PDFs of email messages which in turn contain the attachments to the message.  The attachments are associated with the message. If you were to extract a message, the corresponding attachment would go along with it.

What about those Attachments? I need to print them!

While you can batch print from a PDF Portfolio, the attachments (represented in the dashed box above) won't be printed.

Some firms have simply said they want to extract, convert to PDF, and print the attachments. Acrobat doesn't make this process straightforward or easy and there is no way to keep emails and their associated attachments together.

However, here is a workaround that might help you, especially if your production is small and you just want to burst the attachments from the portfolio.

A Better Solution If you have a large production to manage or want to move email harvested with Acrobat to Summation or Concordance, I suggest you take a look at Evermap's AutoPortfolio plug-in for Acrobat. I covered this plug-in in my EDD Post, too.

 

In this article, I'll cover how to:

1. Convert an Email Portfolio to a PDF Binder
2. Extract attachments
3. Convert attachments to PDF and Print them

Read on to learn more . . .

Full post as published by Acrobat for Legal Professionals on May 23, 2010 (boomark / email).