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There are many products on the market today that are designed to help organizations manage, retain, and archive their e-mail business records and other electronically stored information (ESI). One of the most effective technologies—and certainly one of the easiest tools to use—is the Registered E-mail® service from RPost.

Registered E-mail services work just like registered snail mail, operating at the speed of e-mail with additional functionality not possible in traditional alternatives. When you send an e-mail message via RPost’s Registered E-mail service, you receive a Registered Receipt e-mail, complete with an atomic clock stamp verifying exactly when your message was sent and received as well as proving content of the message and attachments. RPost’s Registered E-mail service provides legal proof that your message was sent by you precisely when you say it was sent, was received by the recipient’s mail room, and was not tampered with or altered in any way.

That’s important because standard e-mail that is sent, received, or archived in electronic or printed form actually has very little evidentiary value in case of a business dispute or litigation. Just how vulnerable is standard received e-mail? With just a few keystrokes, an e-mail recipient can change text, alter the “from” address, edit attachments, adjust the “time sent,” and move e-mail to any folder in the recipient’s system.

At the end of the day, standard e-mail opens your organization to a variety of claims ranging from “I never received your message,” to “That’s not what the message [or attachment] said.” Don’t think you can rely on Read Receipts, standard in Outlook and other e-mail programs, for protection. A Read Receipt, like standard e-mail itself, is nothing more than a text file that can easily be forged and tells nothing about the content that actually was received. In other words, standard e-mail does not provide verifiable proof of delivery, but it does make your organization vulnerable to malicious parties who are set on manipulating your e-mail, and then representing falsehoods as truths.

If You Are Looking for an E-mail Tool that Delivers Verifiable Legal Proof of Content and Delivery, While Providing Reliable Archiving Capabilities, Look No Farther than RPost’s Registered E-mail Service. Add Registered E-mail Services to Your Corporate E-mail Mix to Ensure:

• Proof that the message was sent by you and then received by the recipient’s server

• Proof of content, demonstrating that the message and its attachments had a specific content

• Admissibility in a U.S. court, according to the Federal Rules of Evidence

• Admissibility as evidence, without requiring a witness to testify in person

• Atomic clock proof of time-- proving exactly when the e-mail was sent and received by the recipient

• Encryption for extra privacy, end-to-end

• Conversion to PDF in a secure environment Meta-data scrub to clean hidden data from confidential documents

• Binding agreement via e-mail for electronic contracts

• Electronic signature (for e-mail and attachments) providing the electronic equivalent of a hand-written signature

• Zip compression of attachments

Full article is available in PDF format here.