Can personal emails of an attacking nature be used legally against attacker?

[Wolfie1973]

A friend has been recieving numerous emails of hostile, derogatory and hateful content directed towards her. They have come from several different hotmail email accounts, yet are tracked back to the same IP number. Is there a legal route to use these emails as evidence, in possibly taking the orginator to court?

Any advice or information would be helpful and appreciated. Thanks.

Wolfie

 

[Proserpina]

What exactly is being said?

What are your friends' damages?

 

[CdwJava]

The victim can report this to the police as a possible violation of a law prohibiting annoying and harassing electronic communications pursuant to PC 653m. However, I would not expect the police to do too much follow-up on it as it is a low-level misdemeanor and thus the offense would not qualify for a search warrant, and the police are not too likely to seek a subpoena to obtain the IP information.

Maybe your friend should report it to the police and then simply ignore them. Most such cyberbullies continue because the victim plays along. Stop playing, and maybe he or she will go away.

 

[mightymoose]

The simplest solution will be for your friend to set up a mail filter that prevents these messages from showing up in her email inbox.
If you want to provide the IP number I can give you a little bit of info.

 

[Michael Wechsler]

Agreed with mightymoose. How do you know the IP address of the original sender? I do not believe any free email system includes the original IP address of the person entering the data in any of the headers.