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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