On Fri, Oct 30, 1998 at 03:45:29PM -0500, Ray Everett-Church put this into my mailbox:
Only if you have a really narrowly and poorly worded AUP/TOS contract. The Electronic Communications Privacy Act forbids looking at the contents without authorization, but carriers are protected in certain circumstances some cases and moreover most carriers have provisions in their contracts that fill in the gaps. I would be very surprised if blocking port 25 would be covered by ECPA... filtering it for content without authorization is a different matter.
According to the local US Asst. Atty. Gen., if you tell people you're going to monitor, block, whatever before they sign on to your system and give them the option of going away (this applies to telnet pre-logon banners, but I'm sure an AUP contract falls under the same auspices), and they continue to use your system after being made aware that you can do this, they have absolutely no grounds to complain/file suit/whatever under the ECPA. The usual disclaimers apply. (I am not a lawyer, I cannot quote the specific sections of Title 18, etc. etc. etc.) -dalvenjah -- Dalvenjah FoxFire (aka Sven Nielsen) "And I would've gotten away with it, if Founder, the DALnet IRC Network it hadn't been for you meddling kids!" e-mail: dalvenjah@dal.net WWW: http://www.dal.net/~dalvenjah/ whois: SN90 Try DALnet! http://www.dal.net/