Ooh! But I already had Bilbo. And Eowyn and Eomer and Galadriel and Frodo and Sam and Rosie and Legolas and Gimli and Boromir and Theoden and Aragorn except I called him Elessar and Thorin and Pippin and Treebeard. And a bunch of towers. And some swords. And cities.

This really isn't sustainable, is it?

what kind of information do you want authenticated?

Just that the content of the emails has or has not been changed.

Changed between which two points?

Cirdan? Elendil? Feanor?

Email from my stepmom to a company and back and forth detailing what they have not done despite being paid. They are showing something different than her copies. And it would be better if this didn't end up going to court.

Oooh, Elendil would work, because I've currently got Minas Ithil and Minas Anor as volumes out there. And then if I get the iPad I can name it Anduril.

Cass,

I don't know if anything can be done post-hoc, however, where are your step-mother's email messages? Are they sitting on a server somewhere?

Yeah, if the horse is out of the barn, the issue would be if there are copies of the message sitting on any third party servers whose contents can be verified as unaltered, I'm guessing.

To answer more specifically, if your step-mom's email messages are sitting on a server (gmail, hotmail, etc.), then don't download them, have them stay there.

In gmail, you can click "go to original" and that will show the pathway the email took to get to the recipient. If you want to do this in a formal fashion before court, I would probably bring in a witness to observe me logging into my email account, going to the message(s) in question and printing out the "go to original" and having a notary stamp that person's statement.

If you want to pay a bit to have the above, you can see if there is tech support at your local college or university (or school) and they can observe the same thing, verify that you didn't tamper with the email message and sign a statement. I would send you to Best Buy, but...? The university/school option might come with a fee. You probably would want to bring your own laptop so said witness does not have access to the email longer than necessary.

If this goes to court, you'd need a special consultant to deal with this verification bs, but paying a tech support person might be no more than $50 (or a Farscape boxed set).

Oh, if it is a university, they probably could have you log into a university computer that gets wiped with every login. That might be the best option. have you log in with your credentials and call up the email and have the tech print the original options.