question about outlook.com servers

[Makaveli2007]

I'm trying to find a way to prove that an e-mail I received in my (then hotmail) outlook com - account is real (sender + content...not changed).

In other words, I'm wondering if outlook com (or in the past hotmail) deletes e-mails from its servers or if they keep them for years?

and if they keep them for years, is it possible to access them (or does this require a court order - it's not a lawsuit) and prove I haven't changed them?

thank you!

[bill]

If you closed the account deliberately or left it inactive for about 8 months then Microsoft is supposed to delete the contents from their servers and it will not be recoverable. I have had content from inactive hotmail accounts lost and was not able to recover the data even when I reactivated the account.

There is a grace period [commerce.microsoft.com] for paid accounts apparently.

[Makaveli2007]

thanks for the reply - I didn't know that, so I better make sure I regularly sign into my outlook com-account.

But if you regularly use your outlook.com account - do they keep the e-mails (those that I can see in my freemail account in the browser) on their servers.... forever?

So any e-mail I can see in my outlook.com freemail account, is also still on their servers?

thank you

[bill]

As long as your account is open and active then the mail that you see in the account is on their servers. You can delete mail which eventually becomes unrecoverable. There is no cutoff date for storage of the mail. There used to be limits on the amount of storage (2MB in 1996), but never anything based on message age. I'm sure some still have messages from the 90s in their accounts.

[Makaveli2007]

thanks for your reply - I can't believe I've taken so long to get back to this ;-(.

I basically read everywhere, that an e-mail is just a text document that can be so easily edited, manipulated, etc. that it cannot serve as evidence of much. but I was hoping that if the e-mail was still on the servers of microsoft (in my case), that this could provide evidence that the sender and the content of an e-mail in my inbox are real.

Now, I just learned that whatever e-mail is in my outlook.com - account is also still on microsoft's servers.

what would happen if I edited the source code of an e-mail in my outlook.com - inbox and saved it (I assume this can be done and is one of the problems with using e-mail as evidence - am i wrong?), would these changes immediately be made to the e-mail on microsoft's severs as well (without any evidence that I have changed that e-mail)?

which would then mean that the e-mail still being on microsoft's servers wouldn't help me.

thank you!

[tangor]

The legal standing of an email will depend on local, state or federal laws (in the USA), and even in those jurisdictions may have other challenges. However, recent decisions in many courts have found email to be legal documents. Can't speak to your specific query, just a general response that courts are accepting email as a "document" in some cases.

[bill]

I don't know that you can actually edit e-mail header information on Outlook.com. If header information is intact you can tell when an e-mail was sent and where it came from. There are ways to spoof e-mail headers, but it's not something I know could be done via Outlook.com itself.

As mentioned, legal status of e-mail really depends on local laws for the most part, so you'd need to consult an attorney to get advice like that.