Research On Legal Issues Related To E-mail Evidence

With the popularity of computer networks,e-mail has become the most basic way of the networks in user’s information exchange,because e-mail is formal,convenient and it can help users communicate to others far away.So many users like it especially the business users.In addition to the most basic information exchange,more and more users join in e-mail e-commerce activities.In this situation,when there is a dispute,the e-mail has also become an important evidence.However,the field of e-mail evidence has just started,and many rules are not perfect.When e-mail evidence appears in the court as a new electronic evidence,it faces a series of problems such as the e-mail user identity can not be determined,e-mail authenticity can not be guaranteed and notarized e-mail evidence is difficult to determine.Beginning with e-mail forensics,the definition of e-mail evidence,e-mail evidence owner identity,notarization,and disclaimer are analyzed in detail.Also,it’s been compared with electronic evidence.These are important for the application of e-mail evidence.The main contents and innovations of this paper are as follows.The article firstly introduces the research background of this article in the introduction part,pointed out the importance of the study of e-mail evidence.The article then introduces the most important problems of this paper.This chapter is an overview of the article,introducing the problems which is through the whole article.The first chapter introduces the basic knowledge of e-mail forensics.Before you study e-mail evidence,you must have a basic understanding of e-mail forensics,because legal issues may be appeared in the whole process of e-mail forensics.This chapter firstly introduces the features,structures and e-mail protocols of e-mail.Understanding e-mail structures and e-mail protocols is an important guarantee for clarifying the direction of evidence and improving the efficiency of forensics.Second,this chapter introduces two e-mail forensics methods(before the event and after the event)and then analyzes the e-mail forensics process.The professionalism of e-mail determines the difference between its forensic process and conventional forensics.In order to find out the legal blind spot accurately,you must understand the evidence collection and evidence collection process,then,the final judgments will be maked reasonably.Chapter 2 firstly determines the concept and characteristics of e-mail evidence.There is no specific concept of e-mail evidence in the current judiciary,so there is often a deviation of e-mail evidence when it has been used.The article tries to define the e-mail evidence and summarizes the main features expecting to accurately delineate the scope of e-mail evidence.After that,this chapter makes a more in-depth comparison of electronic evidence and e-mail evidence.As a sub-classification of electronic evidence,they have basic commonality,but there are also many differences.These differences will cause it different when the law is applicable.At the same time,they are also more conducive to the confirmation of the scope of e-mail evidence.Finally,this chapter discusses the principle of judging the effectiveness of e-mail evidence from three aspects: relevance,authenticity and legitimacy,and points out the special situation of e-mail evidence’s appliance.Chapter 3 introduces several e-mail evidence in the current judicial practice,especially the identity authentication and notarization.The contents of this chapter are more specific.They appear at the different stages of application of e-mail evidence.This chapter focuses on the solution of specific problems.This part firstly introduces the problems,then describes the current practice of judicial practice,and finally giving some corresponding solutions by comprehensive analysis.The last chapter is the end of the article.It summarizes the whole article.And then make recommendations on the future development of e-mail evidence.There are three important innovations of this paper.The first of them is determining the specific scope of e-mail evidence.Through the analysis of e-mail text,attachments and their derivative documents,we get the definition of e-mail evidence.Secondly,the article shows the difference between the e-mail evidence and electronic evidence.Through the analysis of the relevance,authenticity and legitimacy of the evidence,we can get the special principle of judging the effectiveness of e-mail evidence.Finally,the article analyzes several important problems about e-mail evidence’s appliance like finding the owner of the email,notarization and disclaimer,trying to give more solutions.