Saved E-mails and their legal value

Business
1

Hello everyone ,

I got a problems on my hands , over the years i have acquired several thousands of e-mails that hold legal value , this range from contracts , PayPal e-mails , agreements , sign-ups ans so forth . They are spread on a lot of servers some of which i would like to take down simply because they do nothing but waste server space . Given the politicians craving for putting out laws that apply retroactively for God knows how many years i want to get this burden off-line and into multiple secured storages .

My questions is how to proceed on this one , do I need to save the e-mails in a certain format ? Do they have to include the header info ? Are the e-mails still valid if the server no longer exists ? I’m interested what does the law says . I know there are U.N. trade rules and stuff that apply worldwide , I’m also interested on the legal dispositions in the U.S. , E.U. and it member states , Canada and other countries in which i could be dragged in a court of law as a E.U. citizen and as a owner of U.S. company located in Delaware .

Given the nature of the e-mails I’m interested in defending myself from claims , tax ripoffs , privacy invasions and various other lovely things some people tend to cook up.

Thank you in advance for you answers .

2

Can you clarify your question?

How did you acquire these emails? What is your specific concern with regards to legal issues? What kind of claims or tax ripoffs are you talking about? Why would you leave the emails on multiple servers if they those servers aren’t being actively used?

3

Thanks for the fast reply :

  • all e-mails where sent to me or by me to/from various organizations and individuals

  • tax ripoffs like someone making a error and coming to the conclusion that i need to pay more for a certain year , government passes a law that retroactively taxes a certain domain of activity and i need to produce evidence that my income from that period did not originated from that activity , etc. etc.

  • about the multiple servers it’s quite simple , over the years i’ve owned dedis and vpses and i’ve used my custom e-mail servers , i kept them because i wanted to store the e-mails and because the hardware usage wasn’t high .

4

Sounds like you don’t have any kind of special circumstance or risk, so you won’t need any kind of a special solution. Why not just decommission each server after creating an archive of all the emails. Then, stash a physical copy somewhere and put up an encrypted backup online somewhere and be done,.

No need to spend time solving problems that haven’t happened yet. Just have your records handy in case something happens.

FYI I’m not sure you need to worry about governments passing a law that affects events that have already taken place, especially when it comes to taxes. I think that would be considered an ‘ex post facto’ but I may have just made that up :slight_smile:

But to protect yourself from the unknown, you should absolutely save those records for a long time.