[Bendug] I want a filter for legaleze

[larry price]

On Sat, 26 Feb 2005 18:11:42 -0800, Tim Howe <thowe at my180.net> wrote:
> I am really starting to get enraged about this new fad of puting legal
> disclaimers in email.  Why do people do this?  Reading some of them makes me
> wonder if it is even legal to store the email on my server...

As near as I can tell those are a lawyerly response to the
accidentally-replied-to-all problem,
the disclaimer is meant to make it more difficult to introduce an
accidentally broadcast email into evidence in a lawsuit, it has little
to do with what most of us would consider to be information security.

> I'm sick of it.  It's fscking email!  It's text that you transmit accross a
> public network!  If it's so secret and private and confidential and legally
> binding and whatever other rediculous bullshit you put in your disclaimer, then
> encrypt it or something!
> 
> What I want is a filter.  Something like dspam or something.  I want this filter
> to detect legal garbage at the end of emails and bounce the mail back to these
> folks telling them that my email server is an At Will server or something.  That
> I do not feel like indulging the legal  bullshit that people seem to think they
> can put in their mail.  that they need to recognize that if my system is
> spending clock cycles to except their mail, store their mail, and deliver their
> mail to me, that it is in fact MY mail and they have no say over what happens to
> it.

I guess it comes down to how you view your relationship to the end
users of your system, if they are your customers and you act as their
agent in receiving and filtering their mail, you have implicit
permission to manage their incoming stream without losing common
carrier status. If you start acting to bounce messages on your own
criteria regardless of how your customers would want those messages to
be dealt with, you lose the protections associated with common carrier
status.

Don't expect J. Random Law-talking-guy to understand that forbidding
the storage and retransmission of an email message effectively
precludes it's delivery.

You need to be careful that you are acting on behalf of your
customers, and not refusing to carry legitimate messages because of
their content. Anything else leads to unhappy customers, and opens you
up to liability you don't want.

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