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Yahoo Ordered to Show How It Recovered 'Deleted' Emails (pcmag.com)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the gone-today,-here-tomorrow dept.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from PC Magazine: Just what kind of email retentions powers does Yahoo have? According to a policy guide from the company, Yahoo cannot recover emails that have been deleted from a user's account -- simple as that. If the email is in a user's account, it's fair game, and Yahoo can even give law enforcement the IP address of whatever computer is being used to send said email.

Or, at least, that's what Yahoo has said. A magistrate judge from the Northern District of California has ordered Yahoo to produce documents, as well as a witness for deposition, related to the company's ability to recover seemingly deleted emails in a UK drug case... a UK defendant was convicted -- and is currently serving an extra 20-year prison sentence -- as part of a conspiracy to import drugs into the United Kingdom. He's currently appealing the conviction, in part because the means by which Yahoo recovered the emails in question allegedly violate British law.
The drug smugglers apparently communicated by creating a draft of an email, which was then available to others who logged into that same account.

21 of 80 comments (clear)

  1. Using drafts by GerryGilmore · · Score: 4, Interesting

    " communicated by creating a draft of an email, which was then available to others who logged into that same account." Crikey! That trick is as old as they come!

    1. Re:Using drafts by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      And it never works. Just ask General Petraeus.

    2. Re:Using drafts by youngatheart · · Score: 2

      Which just goes to show kiddos, encrypt with something like Gpg4win even if you're keeping the message somewhere you think is "secret."

      c:\messages\>gpg --encrypt --recipient "Other Person" TextDocumentExample.txt

      c:\messages\>gpg --decrypt TextDocumentExample.txt.gpg > Decrypted.TextDocumentExample.txt

  2. Same trick David Petraeus used by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    That's the same method David Petraeus used.

  3. You've got to appreciate the irony... by loftarasa · · Score: 3, Interesting

    in the fact that an international drug smuggler wants to appeal his conviction by arguing that Yahoo! "broke the law". I understand the legal reasoning behind it, but if it were Hollywood, not real life, his request would most likely be met with a punch to the face marking the end of the scene.

    1. Re:You've got to appreciate the irony... by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 2

      in the fact that an international drug smuggler wants to appeal his conviction by arguing that Yahoo! "broke the law".

      I don't know much about British law, but in the US that would not help him. Evidence in criminal trials is only thrown out if the police or prosecutors break the law, not a third party.

    2. Re:You've got to appreciate the irony... by Pseudonym · · Score: 3, Insightful

      A far more likely reason is that sometimes it's possible to recover a deleted email and sometimes it is not. By analogy, think of the circumstances under which it is possible to recover a deleted file on disk.

      Yahoo's policy says it can't recover deleted emails because if it said anything else, someone with an expensive lawyer would interpret that as a guarantee.

      --
      sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
    3. Re:You've got to appreciate the irony... by AK+Marc · · Score: 4, Insightful

      If the 3rd party breaks the law at the request of the government, it's treated as if the government broke the law themselves. Note, if Yahoo independently broke the law allowing them access to the emails, then provided those emails when requested, they didn't break the law at the request of the government, unless it can be shown that the initial law breaking was in response to a previous request by the government.

      --
      Learn to love Alaska
    4. Re:You've got to appreciate the irony... by Megol · · Score: 2

      In other parts of the world evidence is always accepted even if someone broke laws to get it. IMHO that's the only logical way - if police illegally break into a house and find evidence a crime have been committed there the evidence is still real. Of course the police in question should get some time in prison too.

    5. Re:You've got to appreciate the irony... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      How about if the law they break is planting evidence?

    6. Re:You've got to appreciate the irony... by Obfuscant · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I'd say a draft is an email that just hasn't been sent yet.

      Drafts do not need to meet any of the standards for Internet messaging, and therefore are not "email". They might contain enough header information to meet the standard, but they don't have to, and many of the drafts I've written certainly do not.

      would you argue that what I wrote isn't actually a letter because it's still sitting on my desk?

      Would you argue that the federal laws regarding US Mail attach to a piece of paper that you are thinking about maybe someday sending through the US Mail system? I.e., yes, I would say that your piece of paper is not yet mail because it has no stamp, has no address, and hasn't been deposited into a mailbox for sending.

      Every sent and received email is also "just a file,"

      No, it may be saved in a file, but it is also email. "Just" is an important word here. It conveys the concept of "only". How they are stored is irrelevant when determining "email" status. Your system may save all email as files, but that does not make all files email.

    7. Re:You've got to appreciate the irony... by The+Grassy+Knoll · · Score: 3, Insightful

      if police illegally break into a house and find evidence a crime have been committed there the evidence is still real

      I wish there was a "-1 Too Young To Have Thought Things Through" mod...

      --
      They will never know the simple pleasure of a monkey knife fight
    8. Re:You've got to appreciate the irony... by RockDoctor · · Score: 2

      In other parts of the world evidence is always

      Let me guess - you're an American?

      It's the way that you think there is a single place called "the rest of the world", and that it is a homogeneous, uniform place defined by it's not being America. Hint: there is human variation outside your experience of your home country. (Actually, there is probably more variation in your home country than you are aware. How many of your country's native languages can you at least read?)

      --
      Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
  4. Backups? by guruevi · · Score: 2

    In the best case, Yahoo recovered them from tape, in the worst case they actually keep stuff around for various nefarious purposes. My bet is that they're doing both for their customers and simply lying about it to their products.

    --
    Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
    1. Re:Backups? by GerryGilmore · · Score: 2

      Possibly. Drafts - by their nature - must be saved, even though sent emails are not.

  5. Seen it a hundred times at least. by Narcocide · · Score: 4, Informative

    Some exec says they can't recover anything deleted from the servers until one of the sysadmins points out that the server backup archives don't process these deletion requests retroactively.

    1. Re:Seen it a hundred times at least. by Todd+Knarr · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Or it may be related to the reliability of recovering from backups. Backups are intended to recover from catastrophic failures, not mere accidental deletion of messages, so recovery of any particular message can be problematic. Even if the message was stored long enough to be caught in a backup, incremental backups mean it may take searching a month's worth of backups to find the exact one that backed up that message. Fail to scan a large enough range and you won't find the message even if it's backed up. If the message was received and then deleted before the next backup run then it may not be on any backup, and there's no way to distinguish not finding it because it wasn't backed up from not finding it because you didn't search the right set of backups. Explaining all that to ordinary users is all but impossible, so from a service-level standpoint it makes more sense to not bring backups up at all and simply say "If you deleted it, we can't recover it.". That, users can comprehend even if they don't agree with it.

      A request from a court for discovery is a completely different matter not limited by the service level provided to users, so it makes sense that Yahoo may be able to produce a message in response to a discovery request that it won't recover in response to a user request simply because they don't want to argue with every user whose message never made it into a backup or who wants them to go back through 5 years worth of backups to find it.

    2. Re:Seen it a hundred times at least. by l0n3s0m3phr34k · · Score: 2

      "Backups are intended to recover from catastrophic failures, not mere accidental deletion of messages" HAHAHAHAHA. That might be the original intention, but end users send in tickets every day in all major corps requesting recovery. "I deleted a sheet in our marketing spreadsheet" "I 'optimized' our HR access file, and now half the data is missing" "Word recovered a file and I saved it immediately but it was from last week so..."...I could go on forever, on average it's a request per week per 25 end users.

  6. It was a draft, so it was never deleted by ArtemaOne · · Score: 2

    It seems really clear that they can get out of this one easy. It was not deleted, it was never sent, thus it was just a discarded draft, and not in violation of any rule they set about deleted emails. An email has been sent, whereas a draft is not an email.

  7. Uh, Your honor, by carld · · Score: 2

    It's technically not an email until you hit the send button.

  8. Re:data mining miners mine my mined data by Obfuscant · · Score: 2

    If you give your email to a data broker company such as Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, LinkedIn, or whoever... then they have it.

    Or even your local Mom and Pop ISP. My ISP decided to outsource email to Google. The day they did that, email I had deleted THREE YEARS PRIOR showed up again.

    There is simply no more excuse for not having even the most basic comprehension of how it works.

    Of course there is. Because of Eternal September there is a huge number of people who are using at tool without the need or desire to know how it works under the hood. And that analogy is deliberate, both because of the slashdot car meme and the fact that the vast majority of people who use automobiles have no clue how they work under the hood.