Have you ever wished that you had sufficient proof of a sent email? Evidence is a program that sets out to provide you with that proof. This user-friendly program will place a time stamp on any email that you send, so you can prove that you sent those files, responded to that email, or had that brilliant idea before anyone else did. While the concept behind Evidence is simple, a program of this sort could have been difficult to use and overly confusion. Thankfully, the developers behind Evidence didn’t go this route and the product is a snap to use. If you can think of any reason why you’d want to have proof of a sent email, here’s how Evidence works.

Using Evidence for the First Time

Using a concept that Evidence calls “eEvid,” users can send up to fifty of these emails per month – Evidence is a free program. After signing up for an Evidence account, you can start sending eEvids right away. To send an eEvid, all you have to do is add “.eevid.com” to the end of any recipient email. For example, if you wanted to send an email to your buddy Jim, you would write “jim@gmail.com.eevid.com.” After that, your email would be send to Jim and Jim would receive your email without seeing the “eevid.com” addition (Evidence removes this portion of the address).

On your end, you will receive an Evidence confirmation of the sent email including a time stamp. You will also receive two PDF files once you’ve sent off an Evidence email. The first PDF contains SHA-256 hashes, and the second file contains the original message header along with the exact contents of the original message. In total, you will receive three pieces of evidence from, well, Evidence. You can then file these files accordingly.

A Completely Stealth Program

The great thing about Evidence is that the person you send an Evidence email to won’t have any idea that you’ve time stamped your email or gained proof that an email was sent. You can do all of these things in stealth mode with Evidence, just in case you don’t want someone to know that you are tracking your every email. The time stamp that Evidence places on your emails is proof that you’ve sent an email at a specific date and time (this holds up in court, by the way), and the hash file that is sent to you via PDF can only be generated once following a sent email. Were you to tamper with this hash file, the file would no longer be valid (this serves as additional evidence, then).

Make sure to keep any Evidence email confirmations that you’ve sent, since the company doesn’t archive this information. You can log into your Evidence account in order to view some basic info like the time stamp of an email and a recipient’s email address. The actual files, however, are not traceable unless you save them on your own. It’s also worth noting that Evidence doesn’t provide any proof that a recipient has read your email, this program only proves that you sent the email. Lastly, if you need to send more than 50 Evidence emails per month, you can sign up for a paid version of this program for $69.95 per year (unlimited).

Note: Evidence will archive email confirmations and files for those who sign up for an Evidence+ account -- well worth the price for businesses, since Evidence+ accounts are multi-user accounts, which will suit business needs perfectly.