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

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.

Comments

Using drafts

[GerryGilmore]

" 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!

Seen it a hundred times at least.

[Narcocide]

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.

Re:Seen it a hundred times at least.

[Todd Knarr]

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.

Re:You've got to appreciate the irony...

[AK Marc]

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.

Re:You've got to appreciate the irony...

[Obfuscant]

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.