Registered Email?
By Scott B. Riddle, Esq. (cross-posted from the Georgia Litigation Blog)
I just read an article on Law.com entitled Can RPost Registered E-Mail Save You From Disaster in the Courtroom? The article discusses RPost, a service that creates a copy of an email and a receipt that is admissible in court --
In actuality, RPost protects the sender with proof of their entire e-mail transaction by providing a registered receipt (which is legally valid evidence) that your registered e-mail was sent; that it was received and when that took place. It also verifies the content of the e-mail message sent, including all the attachments!
If you think that RPost could not be the standard that your next trial might just need, consider this: the Federal Government has tested, approved and accredited RPost, and they use it in the arm of Congress known as the GAO (Government Accountability Office).
Scott: Thanks for posting the article and inviting comments. You note, "creates a copy of an email and a receipt…" While this is correct, people often take this to mean that RPost stores a copy of the email or receipt. In fact, RPost does NOT store a copy, but packages the receipt in such a way that the receipt is a stand alone, verifiable, durable record of the entire e-mail transaction that can reconstruct the original, validated e-mail and attachments, without RPost having to store anything. This is important, so RPost would not be have any e-mail to submit in discovery in a dispute between two parties involving Registered E-mail. Alex, Director of Services, RPost.
There are other registered email services like www.rewpost.com . The main difference is that they save the email on their server. The entire process seems pretty easy and fool proof.
In the future I believe that more and more email will be send registered.