If you are a Hemispheres reader, we know you use email every day. In fact, you probably send more email daily than any other form of communication; at least for important and business-relevant communication. While some of this correspondence is likely casual, some has consequence.

Ask yourself the simple questions:

1. Has anyone ever denied having received your important email? Did this cost you time, money, or aggravation?
2. Have you ever been in a dispute, after the fact, about who said what to whom and when in your back-and-forth email?
3. Have you ever "requested" a read receipt, but never received one?
4. Do you feel comfortable that your important, time-sensitive message has been delivered if you do not get an email "bounce" non-delivery notice?
5. When you send a fax, do you look at or save the fax transmission log?
6. Do you still send documents by expensive overnight courier services?

If you answered yes to any of the above, you owe it to yourself to read on.

An article published in the Legal Technology Journal of London (January 2009) highlights the most common misconceptions that people have related to email. There are challenges that are further detailed in the 2011 Jeffer Mangles Butler & Mitchell LLP corporate counsel’s guide to “Converting Legal and Contract Notices to Electronic Delivery.”  They are:

1. Printed email:  A printed email (from one's sent folder, inbox, or archive) can easily be denied admission into evidence by simply challenging content authenticity, time of sending, or whether the email was delivered at all; as with a few mouse clicks, one can easily change anything in an email – or the other party can easily claim the sending party altered the email.

2. Email copy:  A copy of an email sent to yourself or another person has no bearing as to whether a copy was also delivered to your intended recipient.  Email systems are often configured such that internal copies never even reach the Internet and are simply moved from one file directory to another on the sender’s email server.

3. Electronic archive:  Electronically stored copies of email in an archive of the sender or recipient only provide a record of what the archiving party ‘claims’ to have happened.  Even if the archiving party can forensically prove the content in their archive is authentic, they will be unable to prove delivery or timing of receipt should the recipient claim not to have received it; or authenticity of the sender should the receiver claim to have received a certain email (note, it is very easy, for example, for any receiver to create a false email from any sender and send it into an archive at a specified point in time).

4. Bounce notices: Reliance on bounce notices provide a false sense of security -- most recipient servers turn off bounce notices due to “Directory Harvest Attacks” and “Backscatter Blacklisting” concerns.  Therefore, if the sender does NOT receive a bounce notice, he certainly cannot rely on that to demonstrate successful delivery.

5. Denial of email reception: IT departments often overlook the complexity of “packaging” one's evidence for presentation to other parties. Importantly, if there is a dispute, how does one present the information to the arbitrator, mediator, judge or jury?  How does one show that what has been produced is the authentic information – authentic internet records associated with precise content and uniform times of sending and receiving?  Litigators can simply point to public research and claim their clients never received the email or request the sender to authenticate that the email was in fact received, what the received content said, and when it was received. For example, Ferris Research, a leading messaging analyst, reports, “3% of non-bulk, business-to-business Internet email goes undelivered to its intended recipient.”  How do you prove that your critical email notification was not within than 3 percent?

Using standard email can leave you exposed.  Using fax, online drop boxes and file transfer sites expose your most sensitive personal and financial data to eavesdroppers and hackers on the Internet.  Sending records and correspondence by mail is too slow and delivery timing is uncertain; overnight courier is cumbersome and expensive.

The solution:  “Registered Email” by RPost
Registered Email® services prove legal delivery, content and time for email. For around the price of a general postage stamp, Registered Email services protect the sender of email in case of a subsequent dispute about what they sent, whether it was received, or when.  Specifically, Registered Email® services provide the sender with legal and verifiable evidence of the content and time any email has been sent and received by anyone, anywhere in the world.  Recipients of Registered Email messages do not need any special software, and are not required to take any compliant action to open their email.

The Registered Email technology dates back to early patent filings in 1995. Efforts to begin commercialization of the technology described in these patents began in 2000. Services based on this technology have been used by the United States Government Accounting Office continuously since 2003 and international law firms including Greenberg Traurig LLP, since 2004.  Today, world-class companies in a variety of industries use Registered Email technology to cut cost, save time, and reduce risk for communications between parties in nearly every country of the world.

RPost, the inventor and owner of the Registered Email technology, offers these services to senders of email packaged as an application add-in – an app -- for a variety of software programs, the most popular being Microsoft Outlook and accessing the service through one's existing web-based email via a web browser.

RPost offers Registered Email services as part of an integrated service offering that also includes electronic signature services, electronic contract execution services, end-to-end advanced email encryption services, large file transfer (100 megabytes per message or more) services, meta-data cleaning services, PDF conversion services, and sender authentication services, among others.  RPost delivers these services as software sold as a service that can be implemented in minutes, with no servers and no required desktop software or per-user cost.

Each of these additional services is protected in some manner by RPost patents.  RPost holds rights to 35 patents that have been granted in 21 countries, in addition to pending patents. These telecommunications method and device patents protect RPost’s innovations in the field of secure communications – and the company is so confident in its patents that it is aggressively and successfully enforcing its rights everywhere.

Hemispheres readers can access a complimentary user license by clicking here.