Storage Tip: Register your e-mail for legal proof

July 18, 2007, 10:23 PM — Send your Storage question to David Hill today! | See other Storage tips


What seems to be the problem? One of the biggest targets for e-discovery is e-mail. When you search your e-mail archive you should be able to retrieve all internal e-mail that was sent and received. But what about external e-mail, which is all the e-mail that goes to or comes from outside your enterprise - partners, competitors, customers/clients, or any person/organization outside your own? Yes, you should have all the relevant e-mail that was sent from the outside and also that which was sent by someone in your enterprise to someone outside your enterprise. But can you prove that what was sent to someone outside the organization was also received by that someone? And therein lays the rub. If you cannot prove that someone outside your organization actually got an e-mail, you do not have legal proof of receipt. And that can be a problem.



What do you need to know? A company called RPost illustrates a solution to the problem. RPost has the ability to register e-mail. (As an industry analyst, RPost recently gave me a briefing on the Registered E-mail® service.) RPost provides managed outbound messaging services that include software (an add-in to Outlook, Lotus, or Groupwise that allows you to send Registered E-mail messages) and service (an Internet-based server intermediary through which Registered E-mail messages are forwarded and delivery services verified back to you).



A Registered E-mail message must ensure three things: proof of delivery, proof of content, and proof of time. The first is proof of delivery. A Registered E-mail management server receives the Registered E-mail from a sender and sends it to the server that is responsible for the e-mail of the receiver. The management server conducts a dialogue with the receiver's e-mail server to confirm receipt by the e-mail server. When the management server receives confirmation of a successful delivery, analyzes the transaction meta-data, then it sends a Registered Receipt