How do we prove we did not receive an email a company is adamant they sent?

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A utility company is adamant they sent an email 9 months ago which I am adamant we did not receive; their attachment of email sent has incorrect email address - an '=' symbol in place of a letter, (as well as throughout the email itself) - though they state it to be correct at their end.

How do I prove we did not receive it when they state we must have received it?

Relative computer novices losing approx £300/yr hitting heads against brick wall and feeling like up the creek!

Any help would be greatly appreciated - though please in simple terms!

Clive in UK

Posted 2014-08-29T16:58:04.190

Reputation: 1

I don’t get what this is all about. In my country, e-mail is generally not a medium for legal communication. – Daniel B – 2014-08-29T17:01:59.677

It is very tricky to prove you did not receive an e-mail I guess. E-mail is sort of unreliable communication. The evidence of e-mail arrival to the destination server would be a log file entry of the receiving server. But, still, while being present at the destination server e-mail has to be gotten by the user e-mail client software or viewed by user directly at the server. Absence of the log entry could mean e-mail was never gotten, but the log entry can be deleted easily. I do not think you can easily prove you never got an e-mail. I would assume by default e-mail was not gotten. – VL-80 – 2014-08-29T17:05:27.023

You would show SMTP server logs for the date and time at which they said they sent it and possibly a couple of days afterwards since the sending mail server might have held it in the queue and sent it later or attempted retries. These should show every connection and IP address connecting to the mail server as well as cursory information like MAIL FROM:'s which are readily searchable for the sending email address. – ssnobody – 2014-08-29T17:15:56.503

They can't prove you received it and you can't prove you didn't either. Logging that your mx received it doesn't mean it stored it. And ours auto-rejects fat-finger addresses so if they misaddressed it, they're SOL on my system. Tell 'em to send a registered letter by post next time. – Fiasco Labs – 2014-08-29T18:00:31.780

Legal matters are outside the scope of this site – random – 2014-08-31T03:39:49.100

Answers

email sent has incorrect email address - an '=' symbol in place of a letter, (as well as throughout the email itself)

This could be a "quoted printable" issue.

From Why does my email sometimes show up with funny characters like "=0D" in it? :

Quite often when we receive a message for approval it might be full of what I can only call “funny characters” or character sequences. They always begin with an equals sign, though. For example things like =0D=0A and =3D appear throughout the message.

When you see something like =3D, what you’re seeing is a single character in what’s called “quoted-printable” encoding. “=3D” is, in fact, an equal sign. =0D is a Carriage Return (CR), =0A is a Line Feed (LF), and =0D=0A is a CRLF combination. CR, LF and CRLF are all used to indicate the end of a line of text in plain text emails.

In fact any character can be represented as a three charter “=” sequence in quoted-printable. “=41=73=6B=20=4C=65=6F=21″ for example is “Ask Leo!” in full quoted-printable encoding.

What may have happened is that the email software used by the utility company to forward a copy of their "lost" email has removed or overridden the mail header information that says “this is quoted-printable” and hence your mail program doesn’t know that it should decode the encoded characters.

It simply believes that it’s unencoded plain text email, and it should just be displayed as-is.

You should ask the Utility company to forward the original email as plain text complete with all the original email headers

DavidPostill

Posted 2014-08-29T16:58:04.190

Reputation: 118 938

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Since you say that the email ID has a "=" on it when they initially sent the email (probably forwarded to your correct ID at a later point of time). I hope, that is proof enough!

jjk_charles

Posted 2014-08-29T16:58:04.190

Reputation: 1 087