Since e-mail has become recognised as the equivalent of a registered letter (scary!), I would like to know how courts want it submitted as evidence.
Email arrives with enough headers to fill half an A4 page. It often has a plaintext MIME part and an HTML MIME part. The HTML part is almost always garbage. The code is usually unreadable and it only renders in a decent form in recent mainstream browsers. Sometimes the whole payload is base64-encoded, which is printable but wholly useless to read.
So the question is, what does the court generally accept?
If the details of the email were quite important and it’s a murder trial that calls for evidence of a very high standard, then I suppose the raw forensic blob of text would be needed. But murder trials aside, what’s the general practice?
I use a text-based mail client and generally refuse to render the HTML due to tracker pixels and various shenanigans. My text view of an email is sometimes a bit rough looking, but I prefer it. Does the court accept a raw text representation, including cases where there is only an HTML part and w3m is used for rendering?
There is a shitty practice by tech illiterates to top post (which means to quote the entire message they are responding to below it). So every message embeds a redundant copy of the long history of the thread, sometimes followed by a 20+ line signature block. Are we expected to print 2+ pages for each message in this case?
My temptation is to truncate the quoted threads entirely, and also use a tiny font on the giant signature blocks. But I have no idea how a court will regard this.