People negotiating by e-mail may actually tell the truth more frequently than those negotiating face-to-face, because it is easier to later deny having made an oral misrepresentation than a written one.

You're correct that email is perfectly good proof in court and, as documentation, as good a constraint against deception as a letter and a better one than undocumented oral representations.

If my 25 years of commercial litigation practice taught me anything, however, it taught me that it's far better to prevent deception than to litigate its consequences.

Much of my work required me to interpret the meaning of writings after a dispute arose and litigating the issue whether the parties' documented communications were or were not misleading.

I am happy to say I left legal practice before email became nearly the sole method of communication among business people. Parsing the meaning of email would, I imagine, be more difficult than formal written correspondence because of its telegraphic nature.

The best guard against fraud in the inducement was then and is now a contract written as clearly as possible, containing an integration clause, and reciting all of the representations made by the parties that were material to their decision to enter into the agreement in the first place.

This is particularly critical for mediated settlement agreements here in California where the law does not permit discovery concerning nor the introduction into evidence of any communications, written or oral, that led to the execution of a mediated settlement agreement.

There is now evidence to suggest that ODR can actually be transformative which in itself illustrates its potential.

Certainly, e-mail is not as rich a medium as face-to-face communication, but by allowing both targeted and asynchronous communication it can facilitate participants to make progress between meetings.

There is however, no doubt, that "trust" is a major (perhaps "the" major) issue facing ODR and the Internet itself.