Hello everyone , I got a problems on my hands , over the years i have acquired several thousands of e-mails that hold legal value , this range from contracts , PayPal e-mails , agreements , sign-ups ans so forth . They are spread on a lot of servers some of which i would like to take down simply because they do nothing but waste server space . Given the politicians craving for putting out laws that apply retroactively for God knows how many years i want to get this burden off-line and into multiple secured storages . My questions is how to proceed on this one , do I need to save the e-mails in a certain format ? Do they have to include the header info ? Are the e-mails still valid if the server no longer exists ? I'm interested what does the law says . I know there are U.N. trade rules and stuff that apply worldwide , I'm also interested on the legal dispositions in the U.S. , E.U. and it member states , Canada and other countries in which i could be dragged in a court of law as a E.U. citizen and as a owner of U.S. company located in Delaware . Given the nature of the e-mails I'm interested in defending myself from claims , tax ripoffs , privacy invasions and various other lovely things that looser lawyers tend to cook up. Thank you in advance for you answers .
I do not know of any laws directed at email storage. Basically, what you may want these emails for in the future is to use as evidence of the facts in a given situation. As a lawyer, I save all email correspondence, and I keep the header info as well. However, I save these emails in separate files and they do not necessarily reside on the computer or server that received them. I think you are smart to save these emails. Where they are saved is not so important.
I think OP is asking about tempering the evidence. Digital evidence can be easily modified. When you save these emails to another server/storage, can you proof that it is not altered in any way? Is it reliable and trustworthy enough to be used as evidence? Besides header info, do I need other things to prove the accuracy of these emails (e.g. read/write/access log)? I'm also would love to know the answer for this. - Rufas
Thank you for the answers gentlemen . I'll just save them along in individual files with the header info as well and have a few friends watch me as i download them and place them in a archive. It can't get more secure then that unless i do it in front of a police computer specialist and give them for safe keeping and even then it comes the allegations of tampering with the server prior to the downloading and saving so I'll go with my 1st choice .