[exim] Legality of spam rejection (Re: Out of Office andcoll…

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Author: Phil Pennock
Date:  
To: exim-users
Old-Topics: Re: [exim] Out of Office and collateral spam
Subject: [exim] Legality of spam rejection (Re: Out of Office andcollateral spam)
[ changed Subject: since this is no longer helping the OP ]

On 2007-12-20 at 09:51 +0000, Ian Eiloart wrote:
> Lots of the considerations below (privacy, for example) also apply in the
> UK. You'd expect that, as we're both in the EU. However, none of the
> considerations below prevent us from rejecting email from (for example)
> known spam sources.


When I was postmaster at an ISP in NL, the Dutch legal situation was, to
my non-lawyer understanding, that you we couldn't just discard mail,
because it's not our property to discard. We could reject, leaving it
up to the sending system to generate a bounce, because we never accepted
responsibility for the message; alternatively, we could accept and then,
based on our best guess (ie the spam filter's heuristics) for how to
deliver the mail to the user, we could then deliver it to a different
collection point for the user (a spam folder; for POP3 collection,
spampop.isp.tld:666) instead of the normal place. The user had to have
the option to turn off delivery to the spam-folder and accept it all in
their inbox.

In short, the lawmakers there agree with the designers of SMTP about
responsibility in accepting email and not "frivolously" discarding it.

-Phil