Is it possible to fabricate a Hotmail email in 2022 to deceive the court system into believing it is a legitimate email allegedly sent in 2014?
ie Alter metadata etc (not sure I know what I’m talking about here)
A Civil Court Case I’m aware of is having such an email tendered.
Thankyou
And yes it's also possible to spoof the time and date it was sent.
As others mentioned a specialist should be able to detect it.
Indeed. It'd take someone that knew what they were doing for sure.
For instance, one might think that since a received email is essentially just that .eml file from your screenshot that they can just write over the text in the headers with whatever they want, and to some extent that's true. But depending on what kind of scrutiny you're up against (just boomers? Or is there going to be an actual IT expert providing testimony?) then you've got to make sure the rest of the email is congruent with the modifications too (e.g. the DKIM signature hash, which you'd need to rehash, making sure that you use the same encryption/RFC standard that was actually in use by Hotmail circa 2014).
Or someone who knows how to use google….
You'd be surprised at:
1) Exactly how much most IT jobs boil down to "knowing how to use Google",
2) How many people still can't seem to actually do it.
Nothing is Impossible.
~ not Adidas
Ask your lawyer to get an IT forensic specialist to check it out.
Find a new lawyer first, cause they should be all over this
Not if OP does not have allot of money.
But Dennis DeNuto is the best QC in the country.
allot does not mean 'a lot'.
The OP is the lawyer.
hahaha plot twist
"asking for a friend"
depends how important it is. If you took this approach too often, you will have massive lawyer fees.
what did you do?
OP has just downloaded Photoshop, and just watched Catch Me If You Can
Tampering with data and introducing it as evidence is unlawful.
The header information is usually helpful to start with, but it's not enough to prove the email is real or fake. The header information shows the server/host information who you will then need to contact (or subpeona) for their records (if those records are even kept for that long!) to show that it doesn't match. Whether they cooperate or not is a different story!
In short, it's almost impossible to prove that an email is fake, but you may be able to cast enough doubt that the email is not authentic and get it excluded from the evidence or at least cause the weight of the evidence to be lessened.
Hotmail keeps emails forever as long as the user logs in once a year.
That's true, but if a printed version of the email is submitted and you claim that the email is fake and you didn't send it by showing that it doesn't exist in your Sent box (and didn't simply delete it), then you'd need the host to be able to show that records were kept to show that it is not amongst your 'deleted' records (which I doubt they'd store forever, even for an active account).
A Civil Court Case I’m aware of is having such an email tendered.
If the email actually matters go get Microsoft to provide it as evidence.
Agree. Server log might confirm the timestamp of incoming/outgoing email.
As far as I'm aware (I'm sorry if I'm wrong)
There's all sorts of origin IDs and unique message IDs stored in an email header that makes it traceable.
At first glance yes, you could potentially copy and paste most of the info to make it look "legit"
BUT if you have full tracing logs of the servers, you could actually trace that message to see if it indeed followed the paths of the unique IDs to prove legitimacy.
BUT you also say "sent in 2014". I haven't the foggiest whether server logs would indeed go back that far.
I know in gmail there's actually a reporting tool that will diagnose and trace the message for you:
https://support.google.com/mail/answer/29436?hl=en-GB
I'm sure Microsoft have something similar for their servers surely?
It's very easy to spoof e-mail. It's a lot more difficult to fake the e-mail headers though.
I would imagine a court would request the full header information.
Example: https://www.techlicious.com/images/computers/spoofed-email-h…