Legal Intercept

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Legal Interception

 - This article is a Work in Progress, and may be unfinished or missing sections.

Purpose

Service Providers are increasingly under the legal obligation to capture any persistent state changes within a separate archive mailbox for legal intercept/discovery. For example, if a message is saved as a draft, and then deleted, this still needs to be recorded somehow in the archive mailbox as this mechanism could be used by multiple users to communicate (one writes a draft, the other reads and deletes) without necessarily having those communications ever make it into the archive mailbox.

Legal Intercept is the ability to intercept user messages and send them to another mailbox. Once intercept is turned on, any time that the user sends a message, receives a message, or saves a draft, an intercept message is sent to the specified mailbox with the original message attached. This is different than forwarding, here a new message envelope is constructed to avoid the possibility of bounces returning to the original sender or monitored user.

Note: This feature is implemented in ZCS 5.0.3+ intended for recording web-client actions only. While it may log IMAP/ZCO outgoing actions if you 'save a copy to the sent folder' it does not include basic SMTP sends; please see the ZAD add-on if you need guaranteed recording of actions outside of the ZWC.

Command Usage

The following CLI commands are for common Legal Intercept tasks.

To enable Legal Intercept:

zmprov ma accountToWatch@domain.com zimbraInterceptAddress sendReportTo@domain.com

To check status of Legal Intercept:

zmprov ga accountToWatch@domain.com zimbraInterceptAddress

To disable Legal Intercept:

zmprov ma accountToWatch@domain.com zimbraInterceptAddress ''

or,

zmprov ma accountToWatch@domain.com -zimbraInterceptAddress sendReportTo@domain.com

Intercept Values

The following are Legal Intercept values.

• zimbraInterceptAddress. Intercept messages are sent to this address. When empty, lawful intercept is turned off.

• zimbraInterceptSendHeadersOnly. When TRUE, only the headers are sent, not the message body.

For example, for headers only mode (no message body) you would set:

zmprov ma accountToWatch@domain.com zimbraInterceptSendHeadersOnly TRUE

Message Composition Templates

• zimbraInterceptFrom. Template used to construct the From header of the intercept message.

• zimbraInterceptSubject. Template used to construct the Subject header of the intercept message.

• zimbraInterceptBody. Template used to construct the body of the intercept message.

The default format of the body of the intercept message is currently:

Intercepted message for [user@domain.com]. 
Operation=[Action], folder=[Name], folder ID=[#].

Template Values

The following parameters can be passed to the from/subject/body templates:

• ACCOUNT_DOMAIN. Domain of the account being intercepted.

• ACCOUNT_ADDRESS. Address being intercepted.

• MESSAGE_SUBJECT. Subject of the message being intercepted.

• OPERATION. Operation that the user is performing (E.g. add message, send message, save draft)

• FOLDER_NAME. Name of the folder to which the message was saved.

• FOLDER_ID. ID of the folder to which the message was saved.

• NEWLINE. Used for formatting multi-line message bodies.

Notes

By design legal lntercept does not include mail sent via SMTP clients - please see Bug 30232

In 5.0.3 there's some additional manual configuration needed Bug 26471 - intercept throws NPE (solved in 5.0.5+)

(Workaround is to manually set all the zimbraIntercept COS attributes else you will get an error in the Web-UI.)

For example,

zmprov mc default zimbraInterceptSendHeadersOnly FALSE
zmprov mc default zimbraInterceptFrom "Postmaster <postmaster@\${ACCOUNT_DOMAIN}>"
zmprov mc default zimbraInterceptSubject "Intercepted message for \${ACCOUNT_ADDRESS}: \${MESSAGE_SUBJECT}"
zmprov mc default zimbraInterceptBody "Intercepted message for \${ACCOUNT_ADDRESS}.\${NEWLINE}Operation=\${OPERATION}, folder=\${FOLDER_NAME}, folder ID=\${FOLDER_ID}."

Bugs/Rfe's:

• Bug 21761 - Legal intercept support: IM (real-time reporting vs periodic method of save in chats folder etc)

• Bug 30232 - Legal Intercept doesn't work for sent emails if you use IMAP/POP3/SMTP < Not Targeted.

While legal intercept may log IMAP/ZCO outgoing actions if you 'save a copy to the sent folder' it does not include basic SMTP sends. Please see the Zimbra Archiving & Discovery add-on which does envelope forking & includes cross-mailbox search.

Allowing a domain or delegated administrator to use Legal Intercept

The below blogs describe how you can create a delegated or domain administrator to delegate administrative tasks.

• https://blog.zimbra.com/2021/11/zimbra-skillz-create-zimbra-delegated-administrators/
• https://blog.zimbra.com/2023/05/discover-zimbra-10s-new-delegated-admin-wizard/

In you want the enable the delegated administrator to configure Legal Intercept from the Admin Console UI you can add the rights via the command line as the user zimbra as follows:

zmprov grr domain example.com usr delegated-admin@example.com set.account.zimbraInterceptAddress
zmprov grr domain example.com usr delegated-admin@example.com set.account.zimbraInterceptSendHeadersOnly

Replace example.com and delegated-admin with your actual domain and account.

For more details on using Legal Intercept via the Admin Console UI see; https://blog.zimbra.com/2022/07/zimbra-skillz-legal-intercept-on-zimbra/