Message: 3 Date: Fri, 17 Aug 2007 11:52:30 +1000 From: Daniel Kasak <dkasak nusconsulting com au>
I agree with Patrick on the issues that editing incoming email raises. If you *ever* want to use email in court, you'd better not let anyone find out that you're able to do this, because it will completely invalidate ALL your email as evidence.
I hesitate to state that that claim is unconditionally false because there may possibly be circumstances in which it may be true. However, in most jurisdictions of which I am aware and certainly most of the ones in the overdeveloped world, email evidence is just that: evidence not proof. Like all evidence, it is examined for relevance, plausibility, integrity, tampering and so forth. By the time a case comes to court, any lawyer worth employing will already be aware that email can be altered (by many methods, not just the ones listed so far in this thread) and, depending on the lawyer's motives, provide reasons as to why such alterations may or may not have been made. It's precisely because of the possibility of tampering that mechanisms such as audit trails, escrowed copies, digital signatures and so forth are widely deployed where evidential integrity is important. (And yes, although IANAL, I have experience with presenting email evidence in quasi-judicial contexts.) Paul
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