This may sound rude, but it's not intended to be--what country do you live
in? I think you're either under a different set of laws, or have a
fundamental misunderstanding of them. Your claims are very inaccurate. VERY
inaccurate. The only reason I bring this to the list is that there may be
other people in the same situation as mail.com out there and I think they
may be reading everything that comes through here as fact. It is illegal for
them to block out legitimate email from customers when they agree to provide
the mail to customers. They can make you sign contracts that say this is not
so, but those contracts can have their legality tried in court. All ISPs and
similar services have these contractual agreements that basically disclaim
everything they do and quite frankly, out of personal experience, I can say
they don't last a second in court. If mail.com accidentally blocked out this
and fixed it later that's one thing, but if it was intentional--which in
this case it could be construed as, since they made no effort on their part
to verify the validity of the mail, they are directly liable. Moreover, the
customer and/or the sender would be within their legal rights to sue. The
customer lost his mail and that was bad, but the sender potentially lost
money as well (in the case of premium content subscriptions such as WSJ.com
or others). Customers pay for this service and therefore blocking out a
large and significant chunk of users impedes on their profits.
In this instance I think all is well between Mail.com and the offender, but
I think that they, as well as anyone in similar situations, need to be aware
that this is in fact dangerous. Exercise discretion. For your own sakes.
-----Original Message-----
From: Sam [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Thursday, September 02, 1999 9:19 PM
Cc: Qmail (E-mail)
Subject: Re: Lobby mail.com
Ben Kosse writes:
> > No matter how dumb or not dumb mail.com's action was, they
> > had every legal
> > right to do what they did. It's their servers, their private
> > property, and
> > their bandwidth.
> Which, if you would note, are used by people who enter into a contractual
> arrangement by which they either pay mail.com (iname.com users with a POP
> account, for example) directly or access their e-mail via a web interface
> where they agree to view ads in exchange for, ahem, receiving e-mail. I
In that case, it's those individuals, and not their system administrator,
who have a cause of action to take against mail.com. They might have a
legitimate issue, however it is their issue only, and nobody else's.
> don't know what type of list the guy is running, but if, for example, it
was
> a high importance list and the customers of said list lost money or
similar
> because of mail.com's actions (or the list maintainer lost money because
of
> mail.com's non-researched actions), then either the customers and/or
himself
> have a very decent case.
The customers may in fact do, I never said that they don't. However,
unless they appointed the admin to be their official spokesman, and
explicitly delegated to him the authority to take action on their behalf,
it's none of the admin's business.
--
Sam
