On 2019-10-14 at 15:07 +0200, Thomas Walter via mailop wrote: > Even more interesting: In Germany, this can be seen as not delivering an > email to the recipient which is against the law. The user might be using > POP3 or is not subscribed to the IMAP folder and therefore does not see > the SPAM folder at all. To him the email never existed in the first > place - even worse if it gets deleted automatically after a few days. > > I am not a lawyer and wouldn't know how to translate the legal text into > English, but basically the law states that as soon as you accept a > letter to be transported, you have to forward it to the recipient. The > only way to avoid that responsibility is to not accept the letter in the > first place. Me using the word "letter" in this is a hint on what times > the law is based on, but it counts for email nonetheless.
A similar law in The Netherlands is why, when the ISP I was a postmaster at introduced spam filtering something like 15 years ago, we diverted accepted-but-suspect email into a spam folder and set up a parallel "Spam-POP" service on port 666. We could reject, or accept and deliver to spam, and because the mail was accessible by customers, it complied with the law. Everyone benefited. A spam-folder visible within a normal web UI is _significantly_ easier to use and set up than a separate POP3 service to connect to, just to retrieve spam. So if our Spam-POP service passed muster under Dutch law, then modern Spam Folders seem "likely" to pass muster too. I am not a lawyer, I am a practising professional in the field who has had to talk to legal counsel about such matters in the past; take what I say with appropriate amounts of salt. The mail system needs to "make available" all the mail which it accepted, it does not need to mingle it in or revert to pure reject-or-inbox or anything else. -Phil _______________________________________________ mailop mailing list mailop@mailop.org https://chilli.nosignal.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mailop
