Request for Email Metadata (City of Aurora)

To Whom It May Concern:

Pursuant to the Colorado Public Records Law, I hereby request the following records:

For all email accounts under the management of this city, please provide me the following information for all emails sent and received during January, 2019:

1. From address
2. To address
3. bcc addresses
4. cc addresses
5. Time
6. Date

E-mail metadata is trivially exportable from the IT infrastructure of any modern e-mail archiving or data retention system - such as Microsoft Outlook 365, Google, Datacove, etc. - and should be deliverable in a .CSV, .XLS, or other machine readable format.

Please note that I am not requesting the contents of each email. E-mail metadata does not include the contents of the specified e-mails, thus do not need individual review for redaction.

The requested documents will be made available to the general public, and this request is not being made for commercial purposes.

In the event that there are fees, I would be grateful if you would inform me of the total charges in advance of fulfilling my request. I would prefer the request filled electronically, by e-mail attachment if available or CD-ROM if not.

Thank you in advance for your anticipated cooperation in this matter. I look forward to receiving your response to this request within 3 business days, as the statute requires.

Sincerely,

Matt Chapman - Free Our Info, NFP

Hi Lisa - As discussed, here is the documentation that can be used to extract the requested information. It's a fairly trivial process that's built into Office 365, and there's a non-trivial quantity of documentation and reports on its use. This is a request that has been sent to many agencies throughout the US, and this documentation has been critical in reducing costs by many thousands of dollars in some cases. The use of these tools ought to be dramatic in reducing costs not only with this request, but likely in many other similar situations as well.

Here's the documentation. This was given to another department in another state, so pardon any differences in context:

Steps for exporting email metadata from Office 365:
0. Username must have access to search and export eDiscovery reports. If not, your IT department should have access to either grant the required permissions, or run through these steps themselves.
1. From Internet Explorer, log into https://protection.office.com/.
2. Navigate to "Search & Investigation" -> "eDiscovery" and create a new case.
3. Open the case, then create a new search through "Search" -> "New search"
4. Add a "Type" condition and select, "E-mail messages".
5. Under "Locations" -> "Specific locations" -> "Modify...".
6. Toggle the location that includes "Exchange email" and click "Save".
7. Click "Save & run" and give the search a name.
8. Navigate to "More" -> "Export results", then select the following options:
-Output options: "All items, excluding [...]"
-Export Exchange content as: "Individual messages"
9. Navigate to Export -> "[Name of export]_Export".
10. Click "Download results" and launch the "Unified Export Tool".
11. Paste the export page's "Export key" into the tool's key field.
12. Choose a save location and click "Start"
13. Open "results.csv" from the saved location.
14. Delete all columns that are not the requested metadata and save.

(Please note that depending on the size of the csv files, this may need to be done in batches through the use of a date or sender/receiver conditional within the search query. Similar can be said about filtering down to just your office's department's email addresses.)

Frankly, that's an asinine decision considering the triviality of the steps provided, which have been provided to, and completed by agencies and departments with far less technical capabilities compared to yours.

I will be speaking with my lawyer and will pursue legal action ASAP.

Thank you.
Matt Chapman
Free Our Info, NFP