Good afternoon,

Me and my wife are in the process of getting all the paperwork together for when we apply for the visa next month. Although I a few questions, as for the evidence we have been able to collect most of it i.e accommodation, job contract, bank statements, mobile phone bills ect.

But the problem that we have is showing that we have known each other for over 2 years, we have during this time emailed each other every day and speak on MSN everyday. But aprat from printing all these off to paper we are not sure how esle we can show the embassy.

Does any body know if the embassy will acpet this data visa a DVD or USB drive, because oterwise we will have thousands of sheets of paperwork, the same is also true for the photos that we have taken.

Any advice or past experince would be a great help.

Regards

The embassy do not accept electronic or digital evidence, only paper.

There is no need to print out every e-mail that you have sent each other. Simply print out a selection of headings to show that you have communicated regularly. The actual content of the e-mails is none of their business and should not be necessary; they won't have the content of your phone calls, will they?! Explain what you have done in your sponsor's letter.

With the photos, make up a small album covering the period you have known each other. I used, and consequently recommend, one of those mini albums you get you photos back in when processing them in Thailand.

I have read of these devices being refused, though I have no certain knowledge myself. It would be devastating for this to happen at the point of application.

I have helped my son and his wife to apply for her Visa in Bangkok, and she received the Visa in August six weeks later. Apart from hundreds of photographs carefully assembled into 5 photograph albums with dates and explanations, my son documented their time apart by condensing records of their daily talk via skype and a message service, with a covering note explaining these otherwise incomprehensible sheets.

In the event, his wife expanded these into many pages (I don't know how many) which she had neatly bound into a thickish booklet, handed over with the rest of her documents. I prepared these documents myself, so I know that although they were very copious and potentially irritating and confusing for the ECO, I had divided them into logical groupings, placed them in open sided clearly labelled plastic holders, stapled them together with further labelling, and in principal made everything extremely easy and quick to check through.

I imagined the ECO reading each label, leafing through the quantities of paperwork behind it, moving on quickly through the categories, which of course included the neatly bound booklet of recorded conversations, and eventually being satisfied on all counts.

So may I suggest that you provide a list of all your conversations - presumably several pages of small writing fronted by a brief statement of what this is about, as we did - backed up by a neatly bound booklet of as many examples as you can bear to print out? I imagine the ECO would grasp the point, riffle through the conversations to make sure they are convincing, and tick the box....

Likewise with the photographs. I privately thought my daughter-in-law was overdoing it by supplying her 5 albums, but she sent me a photo of them neatly piled together, the covers clearly labelled with their dates - and it looked perfectly manageable. It took her a great deal of time to sort them out and label them, and I privately think that a smaller selection would have done the job just as well - but she got the visa.

This may all sound like overkill, but we had a weak case (my son lives on benefits) and it worked for us. Maybe you have a strong case and need not put so much work into it.

Perhaps you already know that whatever container holds all these papers, it will be emptied and the papers placed in the VAC's own containers. I warned my daughter-in-law so that she would not be upset, and she was allowed to place the papers into the VAC container herself, in the correct order, calmly.