On Sep 14, 2014, at 6:32 PM, ais523 wrote: > The below-quoted message appears to have got stuck in an email relay > somewhere, and I'm worried it might not be in before the end of the > week. Thus, this is an attempt to re-send it. > > If I have not yet done so, I perform the below-quoted actions. Then I > don't perform them again when the original email finally arrives.
You know, it's not obvious to me that "then I don't perform them again when the original email finally arrives" is actually effective. I don't think it's possible to cancel a future message--if I say "I don't perform the actions I say I perform in my next message", and then, in the next message, I say "I do X", then the first message is irrelevant; I did, in fact, announce I was doing X. Furthermore, case law seems to say that a message is "sent via" a forum around the time that it is *received* by most subscribers to the forum (in the sense that the message has entered their technical domain of control, not that they've actually looked at it). So the "original email" is, in fact, a future message in the relevant legal sense. One might argue that if you said "This is a second, redundant copy of a single message, not a second identical message" in the second email, then both the first and second emails would be considered a single message, and thus actions described in them would not be taken twice. It's certainly legally possible to send multiple copies of a message and not have them be considered multiple messages (indeed, *all* public messages are copied manifold), so I don't see any reason one couldn't do so simply by adding a statement saying "this is not a second message". —the Warrigal
