Advanced Analytics on Emails: Using Metadata for Trend Analysis, Monitoring, and Detecting Suspicious Activity
Learn how email metadata analytics enables organizations to detect suspicious activity, monitor trends, and maintain compliance using Creodata's Mail Journaling solution for Microsoft 365.
Introduction
In modern organizations, email is one of the main channels through which critical and confidential information flows. Whether for internal collaboration, customer support, legal/compliance, procurement, or external communications, email content can reveal important signals about operational performance, security, compliance risk, or even fraud. However, analyzing email content at scale can be expensive, privacy-sensitive, and sometimes not strictly necessary. Metadata — data about the emails (sender, recipient(s), timestamps, size, attachments, routing, subject headers, etc.) — often provides sufficient insights for many analytic or monitoring purposes.
High-performance storage systems with strong indexing and retrieval capabilities make it feasible to store not only the body of emails but also rich metadata at scale, enabling advanced analytics to uncover patterns, anomalies, trends, and suspicious behavior. In the context of email journaling (such as Creodata's Mail Journaling for Microsoft 365), having emails captured, archived, and indexed opens the pathway to performing these analytics while maintaining compliance, security, and data governance.
This article explores the use case of Advanced Analytics on Emails — using metadata for trend analysis, monitoring, or detecting suspicious activity — including how such a system works, what benefits it offers, what challenges there are, and who the target audience is. We'll refer to how Creodata's Mail Journaling product supports or enables such use.
What is Email Metadata & Email Journaling
Email Metadata
Email metadata is the structured information associated with each email message aside from (or in addition to) its content. Common metadata fields include:
- Sender address
- Recipient(s) ("To", "CC", possibly "BCC")
- Timestamps: date sent, date received, possibly last modified
- Message size
- Attachment presence and size/number of attachments
- Subject line or subject keywords
- Email headers including routing information, domain info, sending server IPs
- Flags/status (read/unread, forwarded, replied etc.)
- Folder/label/category information if available
Email Journaling
Email journaling is the process of automatically capturing and storing copies of emails sent/received (and sometimes internal messages) in an organisation, usually for compliance, legal, or governance reasons. Journaling typically captures both the email content (or a copy thereof) and its metadata.
Creodata's Mail Journaling SaaS for Microsoft 365 automates capturing all inbound and outbound emails, storing them in Azure, indexing them, ensuring encryption and searchability.
With journaling in place, organizations have a repository of email data (content + metadata) that can be analyzed for trends, monitored for compliance or security anomalies, or used for investigations (e-discovery) when needed.
Target Audience
Who Benefits and Why
- Compliance & Legal Teams: Ensure regulatory compliance with secure archiving, searchable records, and reliable eDiscovery
- Security Teams / SOC: Detect suspicious activity like insider threats, phishing, or data exfiltration through metadata analytics
- IT & Operations: Monitor email loads, attachment sizes, and system usage to maintain uptime and plan capacity effectively
- Risk & Audit Teams: Identify risky communication patterns, enforce policies, and strengthen internal controls
- Executives & Leadership: Gain visibility into communication trends and external engagement for strategic decision-making
- Regulated Industries: Banks, insurers, healthcare, and government organizations meet strict data retention and privacy requirements
- Large Enterprises: Multinationals with complex operations leverage centralized monitoring to overcome manual oversight limits
- Legal Counsel: Law firms reduce cost and time in litigation by quickly retrieving communications and metadata
Advantages
Referring to Creodata's Mail Journaling product, here are some of the key advantages organizations will get when using this + advanced metadata analytics:
1. Rapid Deployment & Low Startup Overhead
Creodata's solution can be deployed via the Azure Marketplace in minutes/hours. This means organizations can begin gathering metadata and performing analytics quickly.
2. High Reliability, Security, and Compliance
With 99.9% SLA, encryption (in transit and at rest), adherence to GDPR, SOC2, and other compliance frameworks, customers can trust the integrity and legal defensibility of stored data.
3. Scalability via Azure Infrastructure
As email volume increases, or as organizations grow (more users, more departments), the system can scale smoothly. Azure storage/indexing can handle large datasets, backed by Microsoft Partner standards.
4. Full-Featured Search & Retrieval
Being able to filter by multiple metadata fields (sender, time, attachments etc.) makes analytics and investigations efficient. Creodata supports full-text search plus advanced filters.
5. Cost Efficiency
Storing metadata and content in optimized, cloud-native storage with indexing means less maintenance overhead versus on-premise systems. Using Azure means less infrastructure to manage.
6. Zero Maintenance Required by Users
The "SaaS" and "5-minute setup" nature means less effort required from internal IT for setup; Creodata handles much of the backend. This frees internal teams to focus on analysis and action, rather than operating the archival infrastructure.
7. Global Reach, Data Sovereignty, Hybrid Compatibility
Support for Microsoft 365 environments, hybrid Exchange setups, retention policies, all allow organizations in different jurisdictions to maintain compliance with local laws.
Conclusion
Using metadata for advanced analytics of email communications — for trend analysis, monitoring, or detecting suspicious activity — leverages one of the richest yet often under-used sources of insight in organizations. When paired with high-performance storage, efficient indexing, secure archiving/journaling systems (such as Creodata's Mail Journaling for Microsoft 365), this becomes a powerful capability.
Organizations gain from better security posture, compliance readiness, operational visibility, and more efficient handling of legal or audit requests. Though there are cost, privacy, storage, and governance challenges, with the right policies, tools, and design these can be managed. For organizations operating in regulated industries, high volumes, or with high risk, advanced analytics on email metadata is not just a nice-to-have; it's fast becoming essential.
For more information, visit Creodata.com