Tonight there was a question on a Eudora mailing list. Eudora is an
email program no longer in common use. Last updated in 2006!!

Question: I have nine years of past messages on a subject I would like
to share with an attorney. What's a good way to do that? Currently I'm
about to filter all the relevant emails to a single mailbox, but what
would I do from there?

Answers: Had to do with how to convert them to be read as text or html
files

A) Obviously, he should ask the attorney what he wants, but it seems to
me that any sort of conversion to a format used by another software
program risks running afoul of the Best Evidence rule.

And that what he should do is install Eudora on the attorney's computer,
or lend him a laptop with all the emails and Eudora installed too.

Am I right?

I fear the other side may argue headers or text was lost or rearranged,
or attribution was fouled up. And I don't think that's a baseless
concern or a nuisance complaint by the other side. I can imagine it
happening even unintentionally.

Seems to me a text converted to be read by different software is worse
than a copy or facsimile, because "you can do anything you want with a computer". . Look at the suspicion AI is arousing.

And even *within Eudora* (and other email programs too??? I have almost
no experience with other programs.) just copying emails from the Inbox
to any other mailbox causes the loss of headers***. How much more so
would there be a problem copying to other software?

***Perhaps the headers are still there, just not visible, and can be
retrieved by copying back to the inbox, but I've never checked.

B) When he gathers the email to one mailbox (from various files going
back 9 years), should he copy them rather than move them, so that the
original mailbox with all kinds of unrelated email is still there, to
provide the original context for subject emails. Or is that more
caution than opposing lawyers and courts require?

--
I think you can tell, but just to be sure:
I am not a lawyer.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

You need to contact an IT expert. You can always just print them out on
paper or as PDF's.




On Sun, 29 Sep 2024 21:42:09 -0700 (PDT), micky <[email protected]> wrote:

Tonight there was a question on a Eudora mailing list. Eudora is an
email program no longer in common use. Last updated in 2006!!

Question: I have nine years of past messages on a subject I would like
to share with an attorney. What's a good way to do that? Currently I'm >about to filter all the relevant emails to a single mailbox, but what
would I do from there?

Answers: Had to do with how to convert them to be read as text or html
files

A) Obviously, he should ask the attorney what he wants, but it seems to
me that any sort of conversion to a format used by another software
program risks running afoul of the Best Evidence rule.

And that what he should do is install Eudora on the attorney's computer,
or lend him a laptop with all the emails and Eudora installed too.

Am I right?

I fear the other side may argue headers or text was lost or rearranged,
or attribution was fouled up. And I don't think that's a baseless
concern or a nuisance complaint by the other side. I can imagine it >happening even unintentionally.

Seems to me a text converted to be read by different software is worse
than a copy or facsimile, because "you can do anything you want with a >computer". . Look at the suspicion AI is arousing.

And even *within Eudora* (and other email programs too??? I have almost
no experience with other programs.) just copying emails from the Inbox
to any other mailbox causes the loss of headers***. How much more so
would there be a problem copying to other software?

***Perhaps the headers are still there, just not visible, and can be >retrieved by copying back to the inbox, but I've never checked.

B) When he gathers the email to one mailbox (from various files going
back 9 years), should he copy them rather than move them, so that the >original mailbox with all kinds of unrelated email is still there, to
provide the original context for subject emails. Or is that more
caution than opposing lawyers and courts require?

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

FYI, there is a project called Hermes that has been doing minor updates
to Eudora so it's compatible with modern mail systems, and Aurora which
says it's Eudora for today:

https://jackyan.com/blog/2024/03/eudora-users-welcome-aurora-finally-a-modern-secure-unicode-compliant-successor/

I concur with the advice to talk to your lawyer and someone who understands e-mail, but here's a thought.

I am pretty sure that Thunderbird uses the same mbox format that Eudora did
so try putting the mailboxes on a thumb drive an see if your lawyer can
use a current version of Thunderbird to look at them.

Answers: Had to do with how to convert them to be read as text or html
files

I have been an expert in court cases where there were lots of mail
messages converted to PDFs. It was not a big deal. In case of
questions, keep the originals and a technical expert can verify
that the PDFs are a good copy of the originals.

And even *within Eudora* (and other email programs too??? I have almost
no experience with other programs.) just copying emails from the Inbox
to any other mailbox causes the loss of headers***. How much more so
would there be a problem copying to other software?

It shouldn't, it should copy the whole message including the headers.

--
Regards,
John Levine, [email protected], Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)