On Mon, 27 Jan 2003 11:18:14 -0800
Anne P Mitchell <Anne> wrote:
> I'm a lawyer (but please don't hold it against me)...
Awwwww, shucks!
> ... and JC is right.
I knew there had to be a first time.
> At least, from the *sender's* perspective. AOL is under no obligation
> to the *sender* to deliver their email.
> If there is a cause of action at all, it would lay with the AOL users
> - the intended recipients - they may have a cause based on AOL's
> failure to transit and deliver email which they requested. That would
> depend in large part on whether AOL has anywhere stated that user
> services include delivery of email, but there *could* be an "industry
> standard/expectation" tort in there, as well.
I suspect its worse than that.
IANAL but my understanding is that questions of intent and negligence
would have the be established, which I suspect are in themselves
insurmountable hurdles.
SMTP is not a reliable transport, computers are not inherently reliable,
and IIRC AOL already clearly states that they do their own SPAM/etc
suppression as part of their service agreement etc etc yada yada. Ergo,
even if it can be demonstrated from the sender's logs of a successful
delivery of a message to an AOL-owned system (which is difficult enough
to within the rules of evidence and proof), AOL can claim
@
-- AOL can claim a trifling rate of regrettable flase positives in
their spam suppression algorithms, and then show graphs for the
hundreds of millions of SPAM messages it does match.
-- That, yes, like "all computer systems" AOL's do have errors and do
Bad Things now and then, however on a percentage scale its a miniscule
problem that needs long strings of decimal points to express.
-- AOL runs the largest single 'net connected system on the planet.
To make and meet QoS requirements tradeoffs are made. They
aggressively monitor and correct errors in their system, however the
system is huge and complex and of course the staff is overworked but
of course they fix these annoying errors in all good will and
earnestness as soon as they can without breaking the rest of the
system.
-- etc.
Seems way too weak to me, especially given current political climes.
--
J C Lawrence
---------(*) Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas.
claw@kanga.nu He lived as a devil, eh?
http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/ Evil is a name of a foeman, as I live.
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