Gone Pfishing??

IF IT DOESN'T SOUND LIKE ME-IT WASN'T
-the unreliability of unauthenticated email.-

I have an old uncle who refused to get an email address and does not email at all. If you want to communicate with him you have to pick up the phone. He uses the old fashioned method of mailing anything via post or fed ex. I think he is pretty much in the dark ages but he may be on to something. He has never had his email address stolen, been the victim of identify theft via the internet, never had his private or on line banking information compromised and as we speak is happily skiiing in Kitzbuuhl, Austria.
Missing emails can be bane of a lawyers' existence when they look like they could be material and can sometimes invoke sanctions for nondisclosure.

Then there is the authentication issue- and it is a serious issue that court's don't take seriously enough yet. They assume sometimes (typically) anything in an email appended as an Exhibit actually was transmitted in the form that it appears in the Exhibit. This is a grossly fallatious assumption-we now know. Emails can be and are regularly I have found altererd. They can be downloaded into Word and manipulated, with entire text deleted and added. A simple "not" can alter the meaning completely of a contractual term. I once as an electronic discovery attorney was assigned by an unnamed firm a software program that actually allowed the email text to be altered on line. Things marked "hot" were sent to that black hole "review" where I had no idea whether they maintained their integrity or not. Not co-incidentally, the software manufacturer was the same company that was the defendant in the very same litigation. Clever- or just obstruction--(hear no evil, see no evil.) So all emails, to be admissible, should have to be authenticated by the sender before they are credited.

Then there is the issue of spoof emails which are emails sent from someone else's email address. Any high school hacker apparently knows how to hijack an email address and send out emails as though it were from another person. Just yesterday I tried logging into AOL and got a spoof page into which I casually plugged in my password as usual only to find that it didn't connect me, but just stole my password. I can't wait to learn that now I am the seller of Canadian discount pharmaceuticals, products to enlarge male members and other wild porn and go by the name of "stripperella" as every spam-monster misappropriates my business email address. These spoof spammers can also infect your systems with malicious viruses that kidnap all your email address file information and send notices out to your entire listserv of contacts. Because I have several email addresses and they are linked on the address book files, I always love it when I get an email I did not send from one of my email addresses to the other trying to sell me Viagra or with the opening line "HI honey, my name is barbie and if you click this link below I will show you what I can do with my pretzel position."

Here is a good tip- if an email sounds out of character for someone- or if it says something outrageous- it is always a good idea to forward the email back to the person and ask "did you actually send this?" or better yet, do what my old uncle does and call a person for a chat. Otherwise gross misunderstandings go unaddressed, and conflict inevitably follows. If it doesn't sound like me-it probably wasn't. It's easier to set people up now by misappropriation of email addresses than it is to sign up for a free Hotmail address. If you don't want your email "hot", e.g. stolen, change your password every few weeks or less. And if you get an email from someone that you find questionable or annoying, pick up the darn phone for crying out loud.