How to prove that an email has been sent?

Question

I have a dispute on my hands in which the other party (landlord's real estate agent) dishonestly claims to not have received an email that I truly did send.

My questions is, what are the ways to prove that the email was indeed sent?

Thus far, the methods that I have already thought of are:

• Screenshot of the mail in the outbox
• Forwarding a copy of the original email

I am aware of other things like HTTP/ SMTP headers etc that would exist as well.

• Are these useful for my purposes, and if so how do I extract these?

The email in question was sent using Yahoo webmail ( http://au.mail.yahoo.com/ ).

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Edit: I am not seeking legal advice here, just technical advice as to how to gather this information.

Solution 1

Most people are shocked to hear this, but email is not actually guaranteed to ever reach the intended destination.

It might fail for a variety of reasons. It could simply fail to arrive (for several reasons) or could be getting redirected to the recipients spam folder for some reason. If you think an email hasn't been delivered, you should send it again. I usually forward the original so that recipient knows I've been trying.

You can turn on “read receipt” or “return receipt”, which will send an email back to you automatically, but this feature is often disabled by recipients because it has been so often abused by spammers in the past.

Will covered just about everything else in his answer.

Solution 2

There is nothing 100% that you can use to prove on your own.

If you had your own mail server, you can show outgoing logs - however, they can be falsified.

You can use read receipts, but again, they can be falsified.

The best bet is if you use a third party mail server that is impartial, and they can provide logs, that should stand as proof.

You may have luck if you email Yahoo (and say you are willing to pay for their time on the matter) and try to get a log / proof that an email was sent on a time/date.

I am not sure you can force them in to this unless the place you need it for are involved in a criminal matter... It may work for civil, but you would need a court order.

Failing this, if it is in your outbox with a time and date, this is hard/impossible to fake on a web based email server (just check that changing your date/time and sending doesn't fake this). Then, print out and if you need to go to court, you could always have a laptop, 3g stick and projector and prove that it was sent... but again, only if it can be prooved that you can't fake this.

Solution 3

There is a website called readnotify.com that will confirm if you have sent an email and that it will tell you if the email was opened or not. As an example, suppose you register your email [email protected] with readnotify.com, ok, then if you were to send an email to [email protected] via readnotify.com, you can append at the end of the email address in the To field [email protected]. The email gets routed through the readnotify server and with a webpage that you use to sign on to readnotify.com using your registered email address (i.e. [email protected]) with your chosen password, you can then view that the email was sent and the time it was opened by [email protected].

Initially I was sceptical of it as there is no known method or proof that the email was actually sent for a number of reasons such as the route to the intended recipient was down, an incorrect email address was used by accident (it happens to all of us, leave out a vital letter of the email in a hurry and fully convinced that we sent it!) and returns back bounced saying the email address does not exist, a mailserver fell off the internet, dns errors, even a cut in the internet pipe to the destination country or even your email address is marked as junk/spam...the list goes on...to sum, no way of telling..apart from having a sent folder in your email client such as Outlook, Thunderbird etc...

But somehow, readnotify does seem to work. Just don't ask me how it does it, it apparently puts a trace on the email and when the intended recipient opens it, somehow readnotify receives some message to say the email was opened and for how long etc...scary though to think that it does work but that's my opinion.

The long and short way of doing it is to get the ISP of both parties to bend over to send you a record to say that the email was sent..check with your local laws etc as I am sure you would have something in accordance to the data protection act (if a such thing exists in your country)...

Solution 4

Unfortunately, as with physical letters, proof of sending is not proof of receipt.

While the e-mail shows as sent in your mail client and it will probably be shown as sent in your ISPs mail server, there will be (many) other mail servers between there and the final recipient. At each one of these the e-mail could have got lost or delayed, so it could well be that your landlord's estate agent is telling the truth (though I'll admit it's more likely that they are lying).

To have proof of receipt you'll need the equivalent of registered post here in the UK where the recipient has to sign for the letter.

Solution 5

There is a new service (that I'm affiliated with) called The Evidence. Basically you append a wildcard to the recipients email address called an eEvid.

For example, if you were sending the email to [email protected], you would actually send it to [email protected]. When the email gets to John Smith there is no indication that the email has been tracked (John Smith doesn't know) and neither does it ask John Smith to do anything. He is completely unaware of the fact the email has been certified. As the sender of the email you are immediately provided with a Certification of Proof (by email).

It's free for a limited use account.

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Comments

[Admin]

at best you can prove that a mail was delivered between your mailserver and his mailserver.

[Admin]

Great information, however, even if it is in your 'Sent Mail' that is not proof it was delivered. You could get a failed delivery notification you subsequently deleted. I think that by retaining it in your sent mail and tracking the actual email address delivery was attempted may be sufficient proof. Please consult with counsel before attempting, your local laws may vary.

[DaveParillo]

I wouldn't go into too much detail here on trying to find 'proof' an email was sent. Any digitally encoded text can be faked and email is fundamentally a text protocol.

[DaveParillo]

Nice answer. Do you know if readnotify.com works even if the recipient has receipts turned off?

[phildeutsch]

Yes, it does not use receipts apparently...!!! All I know is it just works...

[NVRAM]

See: securityfocus.com/columnists/258

[Tarnay Kálmán]

I once tried to send 5000 e-mails to my gmail address using my ISP's SMTP server and only 4984 arrived... That 16 e-mail just silently disappeared...

[DaveParillo]

@NVRAM - good article - it does depend on HTML mail, and frankly I don't know how prevalent that is. I'm mostly a ascii-email person myself.

[vtest]

Can be faked unless cryptographycally signed I guess.

[user5249203]

@vtest: For proof of transmission you would need a cryptographically signed transmission receipt from an independent SMTP server. Existing SMTP servers (of the sort used by Yahoo) do not provide such receipts, so far as I know.