[Tfug] Slightly OT: Got a weird one regarding EMail logs and ISPs.

[Bexley Hall]

--- On Tue, 6/23/09, Choprboy <choprboy at dakotacom.net> wrote:

> > Your friend's legal team should be in contact with MSN and Cox ASAP so
> > that they preserve the mail logs from that day.
> 
> There is more necessary to it than that. In order to show
> that an email is valid, there need to be two cooberating pieces of
> evidence:
> 1) The email with full headers claiming the
> sender/intermediates/recipients 
> that handled the message.
> 2) The email server logs (or at the very least the sender's
> or receiver's 
> server logs), duly sworn to, cooberating the email transit
> time and size.
> 
> With out both of those, a 'printout' of a headerless email
> produced as 
> evidence might as well be piece of paper typed up outside
> the courtroom 
> minutes before the start of the trial. Any defense lawyer
> that would accept 
> such a thing, presented as evidence, ought to be thrown out
> on the street for 
> falling to challenge the authenticity. The printout is
> nothing better than 
> one party's testimony, at best, it does not establish fact.

Even all this just attests to the fact that *a* message of
a particular size was sent at that time.  It makes no claim
as to the *content* of that message.

Unless the message was digitally signed/timestamped, one
could *easily* argue that you sat down with the "envelope"
for *some* message and carefully counted characters to
craft content suitable to your purpose.