Dana,
For personal and historical reasons, I get sensitive to some of these
distinctions.
Just like some towns relaxed drug laws, smoke within the town limits and no one
minds :-)
This is precisely "unenforced". But it is "invalid" (more
specifically in that case, "illegal") within as well as without. Those
"relaxations" are agreements to not enforce, not changes in the legal
status of the acts. The latter is impossible for a town, since there
are applicable federal (and usually state) laws that cannot be overriden
or nullified by town action.
In addition to nitpicking, this distinction is actually important in the
context of Internet mail. The precise roots of the "just send 8"
argument which cost us so much time lie in the assertion that, if a rule
against a particular practice (here, sending 8bit traffic over SMTP and
through 822) is _unenforced_, the practice thereby becomes _valid_. I
think it would be very unfortunate to choose language that could give
any comfort to future people arguing that anything they can get away
with sending (because servers are robust) is thereby valid/ legal/
permitted.
--john