BARDI77

Hello to everyone,


I have been in Email communication with the real estate agent instead of mail correspondence.

For example the agent declares his consent to change the fixed term lease to a periodic lease with an Email. And many other occasions…

My question is: could these Email communications be taken into consideration by court if any dispute arises in the future? Can I rely them the way people rely on writing?

Note that all these Emails come from the formal Email of that real state agency.


Thank you in advance.

ozhappy981

Yes, you can rely on them.

BARDI77

Thank you for your reply.

Do you have a similar experience?

Cheers ...

Rosscarbery

E-mail is just as legally binding as the written word these days, press send is the equivalent to the old "postal rules".

BARDI77

Thanks mate ...

Deutschmaster

I'd print them out and file them away as you would do with a letter.

Nothing worse than relying on an email which you can't find later due to accidental deletion.

Deancm

Providing the email has the senders email address clearly shown.

CDM

Do any of the posters here have legal backgrounds? It strikes me that it's not terribly difficult to manufacture an e-mail after the fact and claim it to be original (including all the correct headers and time/date stamps). To determine if the e-mail is real or not would require looking into the logs of the mail servers form the sending party, assuming they are available. I'm wondering just how easy it would be to argue this point in a court of law.

When you send a physical letter, you can send it registered delivery or signed for to provide an audit trail of proof that it was delivered. With e-mail, you can do the same but you'd have to digitally sign the outbound e-mail and the vast majority of e-mail is not digitally signed.

I don't claim to know the definitive answer to the OP question but from my point of view, I'd be suspicious of accepting that an e-mail carries the same weight as physical correspondance. Certainly, any time I've received legal advice, it's always been to send registered letters.

- CDM

Deancm

My brothers fiance is a lawyer and yes, emails are recognised by the courts. It wasn't always the case but because email is now the preferred mode of written communication and is used prevalently in business it needs to be recognised. Snail mail is just too slow to be an effective business tool nowadays.

BARDI77

Thank you all for sharing your info

torcraw

Not exactly. I'm in IT Security, and have done some work on the legality of e-mail.

For an e-mail to be non-repudiated and have as much force as a registered letter, you need at a "minimum" to have the headers (the details that are normally hidden that shows the servers and IP addresses where the e-mails originated and travelled to get to you).

But to be ironclad in a court of law, without getting into the technical specifics, digital signatures and certificates (with hashes), issued by a trusted third party such as Verisign, also have to be used on both ends.

Anything short of the above, and someone may be able to argue or prove in court that they never actually sent it or the message was altered after the fact.

For the OP, if it's a real estate deal, even if the above is not adhered to, normally the real and final real estate contract should be e-mailed as a PDF, printed, hand-signed, and scanned back in (as a PDF) to be e-mailed back. Then the hand written signature that is on the scan is as much binding as normal correspondence sent by registered snail mail or fax.

Disclaimer: None of the above is intended to be legal advice

BARDI77

Thank you my friend

MartinLuther

This would tend to suggest that a digitally signed email is more secure as a signed for service in mail only says a letter was transferred and has no knowledge of the content of that letter.

I would think it's much easier for Joe Public to fake a physical letter than an email nowadays.

CDM

You'd have to fake the signature too but I essentially agree with you in that it's probably more difficult to circumvent digital proof than conventional physical proof.

My point originally being that sending a regular (not digitally signed) e-mail message may not necessarily be considered proof of correspondance in a court of law because it's so relatively easy to duplicate or modify (or fabricate even for the benefit of showing proof where non exists).

Be it physical paper post or electronic e-mail, the point is that some sort of unique signature would need to be present as well as the knowledge that the message had not been altered or tampered with en route between sender and recipient.

The blanket statement that e-mail is just as good as regular post simple doesn't hold up to scrutiny - and I'm not even a lawyer. It may be accepted in certain circumstances but when push comes to shove, I doubt you'd have a leg to stand on.

- CDM

MartinLuther

I can see your point but I feel that anything can be faked with enough time, money or patience. Photos are obviously an area where this seems to happen a lot. Faking emails is probably not as easy as it used to be. Even if you go into SMTP and do the commands the mail nowadays often comes with a <allegedly from> marker on it.