On Wednesday, June 22, 2005, 5:52:05 PM, Ian A. White wrote: > Ensuring e-mails are as the sender sent is is important, and it is > only seen when there is a problem.
may be important, in some situations > I was recently caught up in such a situation recently where a client > refused to pay up and then denied ever sending an e-mail where he > clearly stated he was not going to pay. He did not just send a message > with the words "Not Paying", but he quoted back the entire message I > had sent outlining what work I had done, the fact that he had accepted > it and said there were no problems, and that he had subsequently asked > me to do more work because there had been no problems. > When the matter became legal, it was the fact that the messages he had > sent me were as they were sent that resulted in a decision in my > favour. Had I edited the messages I received in any way, the decision > would not have gone in my favour. The crux of the question was whether you had edited the messages, not whether you had had the means to possibly have edited > If you want to archive material, then it is important that the > messages are as received disclaimers and all otherwise it is not an > archive of the messages received, but an archive of extracts. in some circumstances, depending on the reason which you are doing the archiving and the use which you may put the archives to in the future. > Depending on what the messages are, might not make this important, but > an e-mail client should not permit editing messages as received and > then continue to show them as received messages without any indication > they have been changed. By this logic, we should get rid of pens, because someday someone might use one to commit a forgery. I cannot imagine that an issue of the foundation of an email is ever going to come down to whether or not one can prove that it is impossible to change the contents of any message in that software. If it did, then the foundation would not be any good for messages in TB! either, because whenever any ever broaches this topic, someone explains how if one wants to edit messages badly enough, and doesn't mind going the long route instead of being able to do it conveniently, one can always export the message to some other piece of software, make the changes and import it back. If one wants to forge badly enough, one can find the tools. But if one wants to be able to conveniently use software s/he has purchased, to accomplish the tasks that person wants to accomplish to make the data he uses that software to collect and use, that would be somehow suspect because if some other evil doer wanted to use the same software, evil could be done. -- Dwight A. Corrin 928 S Broadway Wichita KS 67211 316.303.1411 fax 316.265.7568 dcorrin at fastmail.fm Using The Bat! 3.5.30 on Windows XP version 5,1 ________________________________________________ Current version is 3.5.25 | 'Using TBUDL' information: http://www.silverstones.com/thebat/TBUDLInfo.html
