I have a dispute on my hands in which the other party (landlord's real estate agent) dishonestly claims to not have received an email that I truly did send.
My questions is, what are the ways to prove that the email was indeed sent?
Thus far, the methods that I have already thought of are:
- Screenshot of the mail in the outbox
- Forwarding a copy of the original email
I am aware of other things like HTTP/ SMTP headers etc that would exist as well.
- Are these useful for my purposes, and if so how do I extract these?
The email in question was sent using Yahoo webmail ( http://au.mail.yahoo.com/ ).
Edit: I am not seeking legal advice here, just technical advice as to how to gather this information.
Best Answer
Most people are shocked to hear this, but email is not actually guaranteed to ever reach the intended destination.
It might fail for a variety of reasons. It could simply fail to arrive (for several reasons) or could be getting redirected to the recipients spam folder for some reason. If you think an email hasn't been delivered, you should send it again. I usually forward the original so that recipient knows I've been trying.
You can turn on “read receipt” or “return receipt”, which will send an email back to you automatically, but this feature is often disabled by recipients because it has been so often abused by spammers in the past.
Will covered just about everything else in his answer.