I can understand customers suing for not having their mail delivered.
However, I can't see where you make the mental leap to the sender being able
to sue. If you are really serious about these claims, then please cite
resources and court decisions that support them.
The real question is, "are you a lawyer?" If you're not, then you really
have no business speaking about the law in any forum.
By the way, I noticed that you responded to Sam's message, but you failed to
respond to Jim Lippard's posts which had a much more specific objection to
your viewpoint, with a relevant quoted source. Is there a reason for this?
--Adam
On Fri, Sep 03, 1999 at 01:13:33AM -0400, Cris Daniluk wrote:
> This may sound rude, but it's not intended to be--what country do you live
> in? I think you're either under a different set of laws, or have a
> fundamental misunderstanding of them. Your claims are very inaccurate. VERY
> inaccurate. The only reason I bring this to the list is that there may be
> other people in the same situation as mail.com out there and I think they
> may be reading everything that comes through here as fact. It is illegal for
> them to block out legitimate email from customers when they agree to provide
> the mail to customers. They can make you sign contracts that say this is not
> so, but those contracts can have their legality tried in court. All ISPs and
> similar services have these contractual agreements that basically disclaim
> everything they do and quite frankly, out of personal experience, I can say
> they don't last a second in court. If mail.com accidentally blocked out this
> and fixed it later that's one thing, but if it was intentional--which in
> this case it could be construed as, since they made no effort on their part
> to verify the validity of the mail, they are directly liable. Moreover, the
> customer and/or the sender would be within their legal rights to sue. The
> customer lost his mail and that was bad, but the sender potentially lost
> money as well (in the case of premium content subscriptions such as WSJ.com
> or others). Customers pay for this service and therefore blocking out a
> large and significant chunk of users impedes on their profits.
>
> In this instance I think all is well between Mail.com and the offender, but
> I think that they, as well as anyone in similar situations, need to be aware
> that this is in fact dangerous. Exercise discretion. For your own sakes.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Sam [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
> Sent: Thursday, September 02, 1999 9:19 PM
> Cc: Qmail (E-mail)
> Subject: Re: Lobby mail.com
>
>
> Ben Kosse writes:
>
> > > No matter how dumb or not dumb mail.com's action was, they
> > > had every legal
> > > right to do what they did. It's their servers, their private
> > > property, and
> > > their bandwidth.
> > Which, if you would note, are used by people who enter into a contractual
> > arrangement by which they either pay mail.com (iname.com users with a POP
> > account, for example) directly or access their e-mail via a web interface
> > where they agree to view ads in exchange for, ahem, receiving e-mail. I
>
> In that case, it's those individuals, and not their system administrator,
> who have a cause of action to take against mail.com. They might have a
> legitimate issue, however it is their issue only, and nobody else's.
>
> > don't know what type of list the guy is running, but if, for example, it
> was
> > a high importance list and the customers of said list lost money or
> similar
> > because of mail.com's actions (or the list maintainer lost money because
> of
> > mail.com's non-researched actions), then either the customers and/or
> himself
> > have a very decent case.
>
> The customers may in fact do, I never said that they don't. However,
> unless they appointed the admin to be their official spokesman, and
> explicitly delegated to him the authority to take action on their behalf,
> it's none of the admin's business.
>
> --
> Sam
>
>
