gordon's Windows SBS pop3connector Password Recovery

This tool is meant to be used by server administrators to recover lost or undocumented E-Mail passwords on a Microsoft Small Business Server. This tool reads the file pop3records.dat created by the POP3 connector. Passwords are encrypted machine dependent, so it is required to run this tool directly on the server. Decryption was tested successfully on Microsoft Small Business Server version 2008 and 2011

The interesting part

... is nothing more than this:

string decryptPass(string ciphertext, byte[] salt)
{
    return Encoding.Unicode.GetString(
        ProtectedData.Unprotect(Convert.FromBase64String(ciphertext), salt, DataProtectionScope.LocalMachine)
    );
}

In this code snippet you can see that the "magic" was done by some built in .net functions. The salt is stored in pop3records.dat too and is called entropy in this file. The salt has to be Base64 decoded like the ciphertext.