E-mail communication has become the need of the hour, with the advent of Internet. However, it is being abused for various illegitimate purposes, such as, spamming, drug trafficking, cyber bullying, phishing, racial vilification, child pornography, and sexual harassment, etc. Several cyber crimes such as identity theft, plagiarism, internet fraud stipulate that the true identity of the e-mail's author be revealed, so that the culprits can be punished in the court of law, by gathering credible evidence against them. Forensic analysis can play a crucial role here, by letting the forensic investigator to gather evidence by examining suspected e-mail accounts. In this context, automated authorship identification can assist the forensic investigator in cyber crime investigation. In this paper we discuss how existing state-of-the-art techniques have been employed for author identification of e-mails and we propose our model for identifying most plausible author of e-mails.

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Cyber Crime E-mail Forensic Analysis Author Identification Stylometric Techniques