How Do You Prove You Never Received an Email

GladGradDad
Sat, 02 Feb 2013 14:34:57 +0000

You can’t prove you never received an email.

However, if they tried hard enough they should be able to prove that an email was sent by going through the logs of their email system but they’re very unlikely to do this. It would likely need to be done by their IT department and the issue you’re having is with the billing department. Even for the IT department it can be tedious and take someone perhaps hours going through logs to find it. Again - they’re very unlikely to be willing to do this.

It doesn’t matter though because not receiving an email isn’t an excuse to not pay the bill any more than not receiving the paper bill in the mail is. No place accepts that excuse. If for some reason the post office misplaced the paper bill or someone stole it out of your mailbox you’re still liable for paying the bill on time. This means you have to be aware of when bills are due and make sure they’re paid when due even if it means you have to track down why you never received a CC bill for some reason, whether email or snail mail or auto-deducted.

I don’t ever do automated payments and especially automatic deductions from a CC or a bank account and you just experienced one of the reasons I don’t do it. I also like to be the one in control and don’t want to forfeit that and on top of that too many people and business processes make errors.

You should be able to prove you wrote them a check for the bill January by determining when you wrote the check, what the check number was, etc. Of course, that doesn’t prove they actually received it - again, you’re always at risk of mail theft or an incompetent business although losing a check like that really doesn’t seem to happen very often.