On Fri, Sep 14, 2001 at 03:10:37PM +1000, Silcock, Stephen wrote:
[completely innocent post to slug list]
>
> PLEASE NOTE:
>
> This email transmission is confidential and intended solely for the
> addressee. If you are not the intended addressee, you must not use,
> disclose or print this transmission and you should delete it from your
> system.
by posting to a mailing list, is the entire list "the addressee" ?
what if you Bcc someone and their name doesn't appear in the headers
at all?
"solely" (according to Webster) means "singly; alone; only; without
another". that pretty clearly restricts all uses of multiple To
addresses, CC, BCC, mailing lists, aliases that expand to more than
one address, funky procmail scripts, etc. using email at your
workplace must surely be painful.
if your mail has some problems and thus doesn't reach the intended
recipient, is the relevant postmaster allowed to help you out? or
should they immediately delete it thus not giving you valuable
debugging information?
if the mailer daemon automatically bounces a copy back to you - and
your mailbox is full (or some similar problem) so it goes to your
postmaster instead, is that counted as "disclosing" it?
if you mistakenly send it to a mail alias, is the mailing list manager
guilty for disclosing it to the list members?
what about mailing list archives? surely anyone stumbling along the
slug archives and downloading your post is not the addressee. If you
really intend for this not to be the case, i suggest you investigate
the relevant X-Noarchive (or whatever they are) headers for mailman
(our mailing list software). unless you expect the list maintainers to
*manually* delete all your posts from the archives?
to what level should the file be deleted? is simply moving it to some
form of "deleted mail" folder sufficient? how about a windows-style
"trash can"? unlinking the directory entry but keeping a reference to
the inodes? freeing the file inode, but leaving the file contents in
ram, swap and disk? if you used a browser based mail reader (like
hotmail), what about proxy and browser caches? what about disk backups
that may have happened before you even read your mail?
surely following the contained instructions counts as "using" the
mail?
bah. people (and companies) should take responsibility for their own
actions, instead of just driving with their hazard lights permanently
on and thinking that gives them some sort of "get out of gaol free"
card.
if its that important, and you think it might go to the wrong
recipients, then .. don't send it via email?
(please don't take this at all personally stephen)
--
- Gus
--
SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/
More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
