Want to know what is really going on in your company?
Data has a better idea
Python Email Scanner
Obtain a FREE python program that can import and scan your email files
Someone in our Webclass said …
… that email is your best friend for unearthing fraud. We think so too. That’s why we recently created a python program that can import PST files and scan them for key words.
What if you wanted to find out which employees are talking to each other about sensitive topics?
We used to think that unstructured data was just for forensics..
… but these days you can easily create a python program to scan emails and check for key words within them. In this example free python program, we enable you to be able to enter a key word, such as a supplier name, a person’s name, “bonus”, “pay-back”, “special discount”… and then be able to see straight away all of the emails that contain those words.
This is a basic python program and we are offering it to you as a code download so you can see how it is written… this is especially interesting for all of those auditors out there who are thinking about getting into python!
Machine Learning, comes into it a little bit, because python has special libraries that recognize automatically where unstructured text is paragraphs or sentences. Furthermore, python can help us to ignore really obvious words, such as “at”, “in” – that we don’t want to include in our Word cloud.
Visualization is a great way to be able to see immediately if your key word is showing up, and the words that occur in the emails when it shows up. For example, if you search for the keyword relating to a supplier, for which there was a Whistleblower case, then it could be interesting to see – in an instance – the other words that tend to show up in the same e-mails and how frequently.
Of course we could make this python program more advanced and package it into an application, …
… which we will do in-time. For example, some of you mentioned that it would be great if it could also manage/ analyse attachments. I was also thinking that it would be great if it had some visualizations to show who is working with whom/ communicating with whom… for certain specific topics/ email headers.
If you have any other requests, then please don’t hesitate to let us know. We will be happy to give our team the challenge of building those requests into the python program, so that we can make it as friendly and useful as possible. Together, we can build exciting tools!
If you have not already done so, get your copy of this free python program. If you need any help getting it running, then please join our Data Leaders In Internal Audit LinkedIn group, where you will see all of the >100 Webclasses that we run every Tuesday at 9AM NY time. Some of those classes are about python and we are learning together as auditors how python can become a real part of our work.
Join our LinkedIn group for more information:
