But in the situation we're dealing with here the from address is XXXXX@wdtk and the replay to is XXXXX@wdtk but they are choosing to reply to YYYYY@wdtk. There's also the question of how do they know that XXXXX and YYYYY both reach the same person? Are they just making an assumption.
In the fred.bloggs and joe.smith example they would be very fooling to assume that, even if the same person had used both addresses they still had access to the one they did not use to send the request. Since it's often easier to start a new account than to retrieve a forgotten password a lot of people will do just that when they forget their password. Also many people will abandon a hotmail or Yahoo! account when the spam level gets too high and never access it again. To claim that a response has reached someone they would first have to demonstrate a reasonable expectation that the person still used and had access to that channel of communication. Stephen Sent using BlackBerry® from Orange -----Original Message----- From: Mark Goodge <[email protected]> Sender: developers-public-bounces+stephenbooth.uk=gmail....@lists.mysociety.org Date: Fri, 16 Mar 2012 11:42:32 To: mySociety public, general purpose discussion list<[email protected]> Reply-To: "mySociety public, general purpose discussion list" <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [mySociety:public] Getting a bit t'd off with what do they know... On 16/03/2012 11:14, Stephen Booth wrote: > But the request isn't from WDTK, it's from a user of what do they > know. The fact that WDTK collates and presents the content of the > mail should not make be conflated with the request being from WDRK > (IANAL, I'm approaching this from a common sense point of view). If > they applied that it would be like saying that a reply to a request > from [email protected] could be sent to [email protected] > and be legal as they are both hotmail. In each case the 'company' is > just acting as an intermediary between the originator of the request > and the recipient, WDTK is acting as a specialised webmail service > with added features and support for the end user. You're thinking of it from a technical point of view, which is no more common sense than the legal point of view :-) If Joe Smith and Fred Bloggs are actually the same person, then yes, an email sent to [email protected] is deemed to have reached the sender even if the sender used [email protected] as the from and reply-to address. The law doesn't concern itself with technicalities like this, it's simply about whether the *person* who sent the request gets to see the response. If they do, then the response has reached them. How the sender chooses to file their inbound email is no concern to the responder. To use an analogy here, your email quoted above has a reply-to header which contains both the list address and your own Gmail address: Reply-To: [email protected], "mySociety public, general purpose discussion list" <[email protected]> I'm ignoring that header and replying to the list address only. But you would get absolutely nowhere if you were to try to argue in court that meant I hadn't replied to you. If you can read this, then I have replied, and the route by which my reply reached you is entirely irrelevant to the question of whether or not I have replied. Mark -- Sent from my Babbage Difference Engine 2 http://mark.goodge.co.uk _______________________________________________ developers-public mailing list [email protected] https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/mailman/listinfo/developers-public Unsubscribe: https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/mailman/options/developers-public/stephenbooth.uk%40gmail.com _______________________________________________ developers-public mailing list [email protected] https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/mailman/listinfo/developers-public Unsubscribe: https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/mailman/options/developers-public/archive%40mail-archive.com
