Sorry for the lack of details, the situation was pretty complicated. Basically the company was bought by another company and they temporarily shared part of the equipment however they kept everything separated in different VLANs and VPNs for privacy reasons. The sysadmin would have gladly extracted the data and backups in our presence but not that day since he was out of country, all he could give us were the credentials of the VPN (no access to anything else due to privacy concerns) but we were limited to access it through the same network port of the workstation.
They were using some kind of wireless bridge that looked perfectly stable at first but crumbled under load resulting in short disconnections once or twice every hour, but that's all we could use. It wasn't really a "success": after weighting the pros/cons it just happened to be enough to not warrant going back another day to acquire a more forensically sound copy of the data (since what we needed were mostly informations).
Anyway, with everybody moving to IMAP and cloud storage it's only going to get worse so I'd really prefer to be prepared for when I'll end up in similar situations. I'll see if I can set up a virtual machine for some tests but my main concern was figuring out what other software to test (e.g. I couldn't find any better replacement for getmail beside desktop clients).
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