Best format to provide archived emails to a lawyer - old thread; solved.

BooJewels

We're in the process of starting some legal action and the substantial email trail is important evidence/information.

I thought I'd done a good job on sending masses of information to the lawyers on CD, well organised in sub-directories etc, but it seems they're already having difficulty with it.

I saved each individual email, as received, as a file - carefully numbered and named with the sender, original subject line and date and time in the filename. I saved these as .eml files and have been able to open these without any difficulty on all of my computers and using a free mail reading program too.

I also pasted the new content of each email chronologically into a word processor document, colour coded for easy identification and each one numbered as per the individual file. Saved and sent this as a 60+ page .pdf with the .eml files in a sub-directory. My thinking was that the pdf would be easy to read through in chronological order to get the gist of events and the .eml files would be more evidential if required later to see each message, as it appeared, as received.

Apparently they can't open the .eml files and can't seemingly make sense of what I've done as someone has printed some of the files, then re-scanned them and organised them differently. Which in itself is frustrating enough. I only sent pdf, png and eml files, thinking they were universally accessible enough.

The only other format for saving the emails that seemingly works is a Unicode text file, but this loses any formatting and digital signatures etc and actually shows less than my word processor pdf document and the way some emails were received this would actually be detrimental - for example, quoted text was italicised instead of properly quoted etc.

Has anyone had to do something similar - what format would work for showing emails as they were received?

googler

Give them access to the e-mail account, so they can save them in a format that suits them?

BooJewels

googler wrote: »

Give them access to the e-mail account, so they can save them in a format that suits them?

Well, I suppose it's one option, but far from ideal. I don't suppose they get to do this with most clients accounts - there must be a more suitable way. I doubt this would pass the requirements for data handling for GDPR either.

forgotmyname

Ask them what format they want?

Why EML and not just plain text ??

arciere

forgotmyname wrote: »

Ask them what format they want?

Why EML and not just plain text ??

Because you can't prove anything with plain text, you could have written the email and pretend it's from someone else.

To prove anything, you need the original email that contains all the internet headers (which tell you what path the email took to reach you, from sender to receiver, who sent it and at what time the servers received it).

OP, where are you downloading the email from? Internet or a program?

BooJewels

forgotmyname wrote: »

Ask them what format they want?

Why EML and not just plain text ??

In answer to your first question, I am indeed waiting to hear back and in answer to the second question, see the penultimate paragraph in my OP.

arciere

Just occurred to me that EML is not very common nowadays, you could try to save it in .msg if your program allows you to do that.

Jon_01

I used to work for the fraud dept of one of the mobile networks. When we had to submit anything for legal use we had to screen dump everything so they could see the context it came from. Maybe try that?

BooJewels

arciere wrote: »

Because you can't prove anything with plain text, you could have written the email and pretend it's from someone else.

To prove anything, you need the original email that contains all the internet headers (which tell you what path the email took to reach you, from sender to receiver, who sent it and at what time the servers received it).

OP, where are you downloading the email from? Internet or a program?

Thanks, you've grasped my dilemma. I saved them from within Thunderbird in this instance as that's what my husband uses for that account - the emails were downloaded to the programme, not just viewed on a web interface.

But the saved eml files would then open in my mail software on another computer and looked the same and they do contain full headers etc. So it had seemed like a good way to do it.

BooJewels

arciere wrote: »

Just occurred to me that EML is not very common nowadays, you could try to save it in .msg if your program allows you to do that.

I don't think that's an option in either of my main mail programmes. Isn't msg proprietary to Outlook? That's why I have the mail app I mentioned - I was sent an msg file as part of a SAR result and couldn't open it as I don't use Outlook.

BooJewels

Jon_01 wrote: »

I used to work for the fraud dept of one of the mobile networks. When we had to submit anything for legal use we had to screen dump everything so they could see the context it came from. Maybe try that?

That was one of the options I'd considered and it may be what they ultimately need if it goes to a tribunal. I've been trying different things to see what looks most authentic.