On Aug 14, 2006, at 12:00 PM, Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu wrote:
On Sun, 13 Aug 2006 21:11:58 PDT, David Schwartz said:
Nonsense. You have tort obligations as well as contractual obligations. Specifically, if you take custody of someone else's data, and you have no contract with that person, you have a tort obligation not to destroy it.
Of course, that only applies if you're dumb enough to answer '250 OK' to the '.' after the DATA. You 5xx that puppy anywhere before that, and you haven't taken custody of that data...
This is ridiculous (not your argument, Valdis, but the whole thread in general). If my customers ask me to, or accept via subscribing to a service with a TOS that so permits, me accepting their mail and throwing it away silently, then that's between me and them, nobody else. This is no different from me authorizing Mail Boxes Etc to be my proxy for UPS packages, and them being allowed to simply discard anything from, say, an ex-wife. My ex-wife has no claim, in this hypothetical, against MBE for tossing my package in the trash, because they're acting as my agent. Now, *I* might have a claim against MBE, if I never authorized them to do so and they didn't have a terms-of-service document which I'd agreed to (actively or passively) which said they could do it, but that's a claim between my agent and myself, not the sender. Cheers, D -- Derek J. Balling Manager of Systems Administration Vassar College 124 Raymond Ave Box 0406 - Computer Center 217 Poughkeepsie, NY 12604 W: (845) 437-7231 C: (845) 249-9731