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Re: [Asrg] Soundness of silence

2009-06-17 08:53:40
David Wall wrote:
What unacceptably affects reliability is that I could claim I never received them since they ended up in the spam folder.

I am sure the law varies around the world, but in the U.S., aside from a few specific areas like turning off utilities, evictions and court orders, the sender is presumed to have complied with their requirements to notify you if other agreements allow for electronic communications and they made a good faith effort to send to your last known email address. Most such agreements put it on you to ensure your current email is on file and that you obviously agree to accept such email from them.

Good faith is enough when it works most of the times. However, that may change if users routinely classify direct marketing as spam, because of the possibly similar phraseology.

When absolute reliability is required, most will use services (email/web-based or postal or even hand-delivered) that require a signature, ID check or other the like. Web tools often have "return-receipts" that work when you read it after logging in for example, and the old "you've been served" works well for various legal issues.

Yeah, the Italian government made provisions for sending that by email as well. That originated because the Italian laws extensively prescribe to use registered mail, possibly with return receipt, especially in the Public Administration, where it became a visible cost after the privatization of postal services. An English description of the mechanism they conceived is available on the IETF as draft-gennai-smime-cnipa-pec. It has legal standing in Italy. Of course, it cannot cope with user agents unexpectedly moving messages to the Junk folder...

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