Will eMails hold up in Court- Sued for Slander/Libel/Defamation?

[thacher]

I recently have been served papers for a slander/libel/defimation case stating that I started a campaign agains at a company. I really have no idea what they are even talking about. They provided no proof of this.

My only question is can this company fabricate emails and messages to people with my email attached. Someone today showed me how emails can be completely altered and changed and printed out or even forwarded and look like the orginal email. How can this hold up in court, if its my email on the email but not what I wrote?

[barraq]

Well, all sorts of things can be forged to look like things that they actually aren't.

Particularly in this day and age, you could pretty easily scan a letter with optical character recognition software, convert it to a word processing document, and change key words and phrases.

There's a word for this: perjury! Courts typically aren't too impressed with it.

Suppose they concoct an email supposedly sent by you on August 1st at 10:25 a.m. I'm no IT expert, but there should be some way for you to get proof from either your email company or ISP that you didn't actually send an email to BillyBob at that time.

Update: if you've already deleted the sent email from your computer, there's no other recipient who could provide you with an original copy, and you're convinced that your email host no longer has any record of this email -- which I find hard to believe, but again, I'm no IT guy -- then it will indeed turn into a he-said/she-said situation.

There's a few other possibilities, though:

-- Did you talk to any friends about the email you sent after you sent it? Such a person could testify as a witness on your behalf.
-- There are methods of obtaining documents from other parties in litigation. (This is called "discovery".) You should be able to get your hands on an original copy of the document from the other side's attorney. That attorney will not risk being disbarred over a perjured email.

[talbot]

no lawyer will take a case he or she cannot win, there has to be some evidences linking you to these emails, the company has to prove that they suffered financially because of what was said and that their image has been tarnished, an email server can provide the emails and the dates and times they were sent, if your IP address was used then you have explaining to do, but all this has to be proven

[webb]

In general, it is possible to use emails this way. But this is very complicated as you have issues like legal jurisdiction and human rights.

Emails cannot be faked easily - every email sent leaves an electronic trace which can be followed by computer forensics investigators.