E-mail danger

The Law Society's recent guidance on the use of e-mail was welcome but did not go far enough in alerting solicitors to one particular risk.

I have a home computer that does not always keep track of the date.

I used it recently to forward to my office an e-mail containing information I needed on a matter I was handling.

The date on the home computer was 18 days behind the true date.

When I looked for the forwarded message on my office computer I could not find it.

That is, not until I was panning through old e-mail messages and there it was, slotted in among the e-mails received 18 days earlier and bearing the date and time given to it by the faulty home computer.

I realised that anyone could falsify the date and time of an e-mail simply by changing the date and time on the sending computer.

The receiving computer does not mark the date of receipt.

Not only that, it will actually place the message in the in-box in the place it would have been had it actually been received on the date it bore.If any solicitors want me to demonstrate that this can happen, they should simply e-mail me and I will forward their message back to them with a bogus date.

The dangers are obvious.

One has only to think of a case against a computer literate litigant in person who wants to claim the sending of information on a date earlier in time than the information was provided in order to gain a costs advantage to see how much of a risk there is.Solicitors must have procedures to ensure not only that their e-mail is checked regularly but also that they can prove when a particular message arrived, whatever date it bears.

Peter Ryder, Thrall Ryder, Truro