Need some e-mail assistance

[Jidoe]

Hey everyone,

My parents are currently undergoing a lawsuit against a travel company that failed to supply services they were paid for (I am sure the whole story is not interesting).

In the company's statement of defence they claim to have sent some information regarding changes they have made prior to my parents' trip, however, my parents never received it. My question is - is there a way to prove you never received certain email or to prove the company never sent the email (and for that matter, is it possible to backdate such a thing?).

I would appreciate it if anyone can help me

[Rosuav]

Originally posted by Jidoe
My question is - is there a way to prove you never received certain email or to prove the company never sent the email (and for that matter, is it possible to backdate such a thing?).

I would appreciate it if anyone can help me

You're talking legal action, here, so it may be possible to get hold of some logs. Unfortunately, logs can be falsified.

The crucial thing is to get the message ID from the travel company. Once you have that, you'll need to ask your parents' ISP (or mail host, if they use Yahoo/Google/etc) to search their logs for that ID... and cross fingers and hope that logs have been kept of all that.

The travel co should, if they did indeed send the message, be able to forward you a copy with all headers. That would be a good place to start. They can probably also tell you what IPs they send mail from, which would help with the search. Unfortunately, it's going to be nearly impossible to prove. If they furnish a message ID, but you can't find it in your logs, there's no way to know if either of you is lying; because it's quite possible that one of you doesn't have sufficient logs. You might get some information, though, so if the matter's serious enough (legal action is; most "Hey, did you get my email" questions are not), it's an open avenue of investigation.

You may be out of luck though. Sorry.

[Jidoe]

Thanks

[Aristotle]

WARNING #1: This is not legal advice.

WARNING #2: I have zero knowledge with of law.

NOTE #1: More details would be helpful. For example, what happened? Did they fail to perform their duties in a contract? Did the email involve changes to the agreement? Etc. The more details the better actually, as the details are potentially crucial.

Most likely... (please notice the many disclaimers):

From a legal standpoint it would not really matter what they sent you in email. For the purposes of this response, I am going to assume the situation is somewhat like this:

1) Your parents paid a travel company for some type of tickets, tour, or other travel services.

2) The terms were clearly stated in advance, and based on those terms your parents entered into a contract with the travel company and paid for the services/tickets/etc.

3) Your parents either attempted to use the tickets and were unable to do so, or went on the trip and things did not happen as they were supposed to.

4) The travel company claims that somewhere between #2 and #3 they sent your parents an email regarding the changes to the contract signed in #1 and #2.

If this is even close to the situation, their email is irrelevant. Whatever changes to the contract/terms they would have made in that email are not valid unless your parents expressly agreed to those terms. Since your parents sent no email back confirming and agreeing to the changes they did not agree to an alteration of the contract terms. One party to a contract cannot unilaterally change the terms after a contract has been fully integrated.

[Jidoe]

The email in question supposedly contained information regarding changes of hotels (to hotels of lower standards) after the payment was already made.

The thing is this - my parents knew of the change before they flew as they received vouchers from the travel company and noticed there is a discrepancy between the list of hotels they received and the vouchers (they received the vouchers a couple of days before their flight, so it was already too late to change anything). They called the company's manager to inquire about the change and he completely freaked out when he heard that, but didn't return them the difference between the hotels they paid for and the hotels they received (that's really what it was all about, a matter of a couple of thousand dollars), and he never mentioned in that meeting there was a new list of hotels (probably because there never was).

It's probably an easy case that won't need any more evidence than what we already have, but I do want to raise the sincere doubt that such e-mail was never sent and the whole statement of defense is false evidence.

[Aristotle]

In an American court, it would be better (and sufficient) to simply state that any such email, even if it did arrive, would be immaterial. They can't just send off emails downgrading services unilaterally without the acceptance (and reimbursement) of their customer.

[Rosuav]

Originally posted by Jidoe
It's probably an easy case that won't need any more evidence than what we already have, but I do want to raise the sincere doubt that such e-mail was never sent and the whole statement of defense is false evidence.

In that case, I'd leave off the email question, at least for now. If you find you need the evidence, it'd be possible to revisit it, but it's going to be a lot of work to try to find evidence by that route.