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About Josh Chalifour
I direct the development and publication of research content for a software selection and decision support firm. I also analyze free and open source software issues. Our enterprise software decision support models are used by large organizations during their selection projects.
In addition, I write articles, analyses, and research. I coordinate a team of analysts, writers, editors, and translators with industry experts, vendors, consultants, and selection project leaders.
Prior to working for TEC, I was a member of Intraware's Compariscope software analysis arm in which I researched corporate technology information and trends, designed and set up test environments, and was responsible for coordinating and developing web content (enterprise software research, analyses, case studies, and white papers). I also held positions as a system administrator, responsible for a wide area network (WAN) spanning five cities, with several hundred computers; and as a telecommunications programmer in which I was certified for AT&T PBX administration.
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Just One Problem with E-mails as Evidence
Having been involved in a lawsuit where internal e-mails were used as damning evidence in the case, I can see how easy it is to have these messages totally misrepresented.
Companies involved in lawsuits now, must during the early discovery period, collect massive quantities of documentation from years of saved up e-mails, which the lawyers then use in their cases. This is a huge huge problem because of the nature of e-mail.
Without even getting into the reliability of who actually wrote what, these messages are way too easy to be taken out of context and thus have their meanings represented to non-participants (anyone outside the original conversation) in a way that's simply wrong. The example in this article illustrates this.
Writing an e-mail often tends to seemlessly refer to conversations, activities, and other background context that is outside of anything stated within the e-mail. It just gets worse when there are back-and-forth e-mail threads, where sometimes a whole thread is captured, other times only portions of it are sent to various participants, and they can even respond without knowing the full context, thus sending the e-mail discussion down a different path.
So e-mail archives are like semi-permanent records of things that occured but they're simultaneously very unreliable as records because they do not capture any of the "real world" context in which they occurred. And that context is frequently day-to-day trivia in people's memories so it's lost of faulty when lawyers try to resurrect it after a few years.
This is a reason why some companies implement mandatory e-mail destruction policies after a period of time. It's not that there's anything a company necessarily wishes to hide, but rather completely innocent conversations can be perverted into unintended meanings. Too bad that justice systems are able to be gamed like the example in this article shows.