Does e-mail have legal effect?

E-mail belongs to the electronic data of legal evidence. Legal and authentic e-mail has legal effect. Forensic evidence includes e-mail evidence notarization, e-mail evidence demonstration in court, authenticated e-mail evidence, and e-mail evidence recognized by both the original defendant and the defendant. It is only printed e-mail evidence, and the authenticity of the letter is confirmed by preserving the records of the other party, the third party and the network service provider through evidence. An electronic contract is also a legal contract. As long as both parties sign to express their true intentions, the signed contract is valid. (1) Compare the email with other evidence, and ask relevant personnel to confront it if necessary;

(2) Check whether the e-mail address is obtained from an Internet service provider or registered for free. Generally speaking, the former is more reliable;

(3) Review the sending and receiving time of letters. If a letter is sent by a foreign network service provider or delivered by an international letter transponder, it must take a certain time, otherwise it will not conform to the objective situation;

(4) When necessary, ask the network service provider to provide assistance and directly save the evidence from the transmission and storage of e-mail. Or identify the reliability of the environment generated, stored and transmitted from e-mail, whether it has been tampered with, etc. , please put forward expert opinions.

Legal basis:

People's Republic of China (PRC) Civil Code

Article 469 The parties may conclude a contract in writing, orally or in other forms. Written form refers to contracts, letters, telegrams, telexes, faxes and other forms that can tangibly express the contents contained. A data message that can tangibly express its content through electronic data interchange, e-mail, etc. , and can be retrieved at any time, are considered in writing.

Article 491 The parties entered into a contract in the form of data messages. It is also required to sign a confirmation letter, and the contract is established when the confirmation letter is signed. If the information of a commodity or service released by one party through information networks such as the Internet meets the conditions of the offer, the contract is established when the other party successfully selects the commodity or service and submits the order, unless otherwise agreed by the parties.

Derivative problem:

What are the main types of electronic evidence?

The types of electronic evidence are:

(1) word processing file: a file formed by a word processing system, which consists of characters, punctuation, tables, various symbols or other coded texts. Files generated by different types of Word processing software are incompatible (such as Word and WPS), and files generated by different coding rules cannot be read directly. All these softwares, systems and codes, together with text content, constitute the basic elements of word processing files.

(2) Graphic processing files: graphic data aided by computer special software system, through which people can intuitively understand the relationship between discontinuous data and make complex information vivid and clear.

(3) Database file: a file composed of several original data records. The function of database system is to input and store data, query records and output results according to instructions. It has high information value, but it has practical use and value only after sorting out and summarizing.

(4) Program files: tools for computers to communicate with people. The software consists of several program files.

(5) Video, audio and video files: commonly known as "multimedia" files, which are usually edited by scanning recognition, video capture and audio input.