Evidence Act cap 6 Laws of Uganda for the admissibility of documentary evidence. Therefore even without a statute the principles developed in America can be of persuasive value as far as the analogy with the traditional grounds are concerned. According to Jie ZHENG in an article “Email Evidence Preservation, How to Balance the Obligation and the High Cost: Lex Electronica, Vol 14 n 2: “To be admitted as evidence, an electronic message must first be authenticated or identified. Authentication is the process by which the authenticity, or genuineness, of the document is established. Whether the document is what it purports to be is a matter of conditional relevance i.e. the document is relevant only if the document is what it purports to be. E-mails are composed of a “header” and “body”. While the body of the email contains the individual text composed by the sender, the header listing the sender’s name and address, the recipient’s user name and address, the transmission date and time and the subject matter of the mailing. If email is produced by a party from the party’s files and on its face purports to have been sent by that party, these circumstances alone may suffice to establish authenticity. Authentication should be made through a knowledgeable witness who can identify the authorship as well as the documents appearance, contents, substance, internal patterns, or other distinctive characteristics. Given that most emails contained certain identifying markers, such as the address from which they were sent, the name of the sender, or the company name, that information, coupled with their production during discovery, should be enough to satisfy the authentication requirements. However, new technology requires new rules of authentication of emails, which lead to the uncertainties of authenticity for an email evidence on a case by case basis...” 2. Admissibility of email evidence At page 7 “...Electronic evidence, as a type of “documentary evidence” must satisfy the same rules as are required for traditional documentary evidence to be admitted into evidence. It is subject to civil discovery in the same manner as paper documents. 19