Outlook.com Data Lost After 2 Years of Inactivity

When performing electronic discovery for web based email accounts, keep in mind that a outlook.com account may become disabled if a user has not logged in for more than 2 years. After this period, may not be possible to recover the data for the account at all. Outlook reserves the right to delete the data.

See the services agreement posted here.

OneDrive accounts will be closed after more than one year of inactivity. After a user voluntarily closes their email account, Microsoft will still permit it to be reactivated for another 60 days.

Emojis and the Law

Here's more on the subject discussed in the Tip of the Night for December 21, 2019, "Your Recipient May Not See Your☺As You Do".

In 2018, a professor of law at the Santa Clara University School of Law, published a study focusing on how electronic productions may vary the appearance of emojis which are standardized in Unicode. Goldman, Eric, Emojis and the Law (2018). 93 Washington Law Review 1227 (2018), Santa Clara Univ. Legal Studies Research Paper, No. 2018-06, available at, https://ssrn.com/abstract=3133412 .

Goldman's study makes these key points:

1. Different platforms will interpret emojis differently, as Unicode emoji standardizations do not take designs into account. The original color and shape can be altered. In this example of how a cow emoji will be shown on different platforms, the Unicode-coded emoji is shown on the left - black & white and just an outline.

2. Emojis often contain subtle features which some users might not notice. Compare the Unicode “Smiling Face With Open Mouth & Smiling Eyes” emoji:

. . . with the "Smiling Face With Open Mouth & Cold Sweat” emoji.

3. Platforms often vary how an emoji with a fixed description appears in different versions of their software. See the evolution of the Microsoft grinning face emoji:

4. Users will assign very different meanings to emojis that appear differently on two platforms. For example, the Android "Grimacing Face” emoji got the reactions shown in orange on the below chart, but the Apple version of the "Grimacing Face” face emoji got the reactions shown in blue.

Forensic Review of Gmail Message to Find What Time It Was Sent

In his blog post of June 17, 2020, the great Craig Ball discussed how to determine the precise time that a gmail message was sent by reviewing the original code of the message. This can help clear up confusion caused by email threads between people in different time zones. Here's a rundown of how to do this.

1. In an email message sent from a gmail account, select the drop-down menu by clicking on the three dots to the right of the message's header, and then select 'Show original'.

2. This will open the raw code for the message. Review the code for references to a timestamp. You should be able to find these by searching for the tag, "t=". The value following this tag measures the number of 100 nanosecond intervals between the precise time the message was sent and midnight on January 1, 1601. Windows uses this arbitrary date (or the date of the first full century since the adoption of the Gregorian calendar) as a yardstick. In this example we find the number, '1594755105' used as a time code.

3. On the site of Dan's Tools, there is an epoch timestamp converter. When the number 1594755105 is entered it gives the precise time of July 14, 2020, 19:31:45 UTC.