Email as Documentary Evidence
Owing to the greater dependence of businesses on email communication, email messages play an important role for exhibiting documentary evidence in the court. E-mail is a form of communication that emphasizes users for freely communicating their feelings. Some users take it granted that emails are informal means of communication and so take less care while composing messages and this causes problems in litigation cases.
It is essential for any business organization to maintain a pragmatic and a strong system for safe keeping of email messages exchanged between the organizations at all levels. Otherwise, emails could be misplaced or reach to the wrong hands for exuberant exploitation.
As according to the legal rule under SEC Rule 17a-4, the company should maintain regular indexing of email data periodically. It states that the records of several communications of a company must be preserved and indexed on an ineradicable media with immediate availability for a duration of six months. It also enforces the maintenance of duplicate records at some other unreachable location. A Datalink source cited an example of a hierarchy system which cites the importance of an email management approach in a company.
The above mentioned hierarchy represents the information that an organization must maintain the three techniques to come up transparently in any of the litigation procedures.
Question of Email Messages Authenticity
However, the reliability and admissibility of email as evidence in court is often questioned by people and lawyers. Reason being there are no measures for protecting the integrity or authenticity of emails in an organization. Therefore, the dependability or admissibility of email messages as evidence may be subjected to question.
E-mail evidence in most cases provides most prejudicial information because users prevalently apprehend emails by using it as an informal form of communication just as talking over phone to relay messages. Here, are some of the drawbacks that subjects the email messages to changes or modifications
E-Mail Messages Can Be forged
Emails are easily predisposed to changes and modifications. Being fragile, they can be intentionally altered. Most of the emailing applications have the environment to allow people for modifying the messages before forwarding them to recipients. However, if the messages are altered after forwarding to the recipient then it is difficult to trace the actual communication.
Another problem which arises in case of authenticity for email messages is when emails are sent to recipients without any formal signature of the sender. This creates problem in identifying the original sender.
Get Access to a Fairer Way of Exuding Evidence in Legal Procedures
Concerning the above problems, forensic investigators are often encouraged to use tools that would provide the credibility and reliability of email messages. One such tool that is popular among forensic investigators for forensic investigation of emails is MailXaminer. It facilitates experts to access email messages of any file format and examine them for scooping out evidence. It provides a platform to analyze the headers of email messages in order to find out whether they are manipulated or not.
Taking help of such kind of utilities forensic experts can analyze the emails thoroughly and hence produce evidence that will draw attention to important aspects of the case and hence result in the fairer execution of litigation procedures.
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