Can this email serve as proof?
An official email goes out, a decision relies on it. Months later, someone disputes it. Can you still prove when it arrived, what it actually said, and what happened afterward?
Galaxy Conseils • Banking & financial institutions sector
On October 12 at 2:20 PM, Société Alpha's senior management sends their bank an official email: decision notice no. 2026-148. Aïcha withdraws signing authority from her former CFO, who has just left the company. The signed decision is attached as a PDF.
The next morning, a payment order signed by that former CFO arrives at the branch. The bank refuses it. Aïcha is relieved: her bank protected her company.
"Three months later, the payment's intended beneficiary disputes it. His lawyer writes to the bank: 'Prove you had been informed before refusing this order.'"
At the bank, the search begins. The original email had landed in the branch's inbox. It had been forwarded twice, printed, annotated. The employee who handled it has since changed departments. They find a forward, but the lawyer dismisses it: "A forward could have been altered. Where's the original? What time did you receive it?"
The bank had acted correctly. But for weeks, it couldn't prove it. And Aïcha, called to testify, had to dive back into a matter she thought was closed.
An uncertain date
Between the original, the forwards and the printouts, no one is sure anymore when the message actually arrived.
Disputable content
A forwarded or copied email could have been altered. Without the original, the evidence is fragile.
No history
There's no way to say who read it, who processed it, and what action followed.
An untraceable original
It stayed in an employee's inbox — someone who may have left — or it was simply deleted.
For a bank, this is not a minor detail: it is the bank's ability to defend itself in a dispute and to answer to auditors and regulators.
An email that binds the bank or its client deserves the same care as a registered paper letter: a reliable date and time of receipt, content that no longer changes, and a trace of everything that happened next.
Three months later, when the lawyer writes in, the legal department searches "2026-148." Within seconds, it produces the original email and its attachment, the time of receipt, and the history showing the signatory list was updated that very day.
The case is closed within days. The bank proved it had acted correctly. And all Aïcha had to do was make one call — to thank her bank.
Reliable timestamping — every email carries its date and time of receipt, preserved with it.
Unalterable content — once archived, the email can no longer be changed.
A complete history — who opened the email, when, and what happened afterward.
Retrievable evidence — pull up the email and its attachments within seconds, even years later.
In M-Files, a logged email is no longer just a message sitting in an inbox. It's a document in its own right, with its own metadata, its file, its lifecycle, and its access rights.
The lifecycle (received, logged, processed, archived) is configured to match your rules. At the archiving stage, rights switch to read-only. And the activity log keeps track of every view and every change, with no one having to note it by hand.
"And in your organization? If a client disputed tomorrow an instruction received by email six months ago, could you produce the original, its time of receipt, and what happened next?"
If the answer is "we'd have to look," your official emails deserve to be archived as evidence.
We help banks and financial institutions archive their official emails with M-Files, built around their own procedures and compliance requirements.
Galaxy Conseils: innovation in the service of your performance.
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