[Hector Santos]
Push comes to shove, this is mail tampering and its against the law.
We're talking about *email*, not postal mail. I don't think the U.S.
laws regarding tampering with postal mail apply to email; I'm not sure
about other countries. Maybe wiretapping laws apply in some way.
Anyway, in the US at least, email received by an organization on
behalf of an employee is the property of the organization, not the
individual. And to cover another base, most service providers have
terms of service which give them the right to inspect, modify, block,
or do whatever else they want to to your traffic to keep things
running smoothly. An example can be found here:
http://www.earthlink.net/about/policies/dial/
...which seems to let Earthlink do whatever it wants to your traffic,
and change the terms of the agreement at any time.
But IANAL, and I don't really know what I'm talking about. Are you a lawyer?
Don't screw around with user mail. Please consider
the fact I am not admin. We supply admins with the mail transport and
hosting software. Admins may have a different view on all this and in many
respects,
I am an admin, for a few organizations. And I have had CEOs tell me to
stop the spam, phishing, and viruses. Now. Without changing anyone's
email address. The company owns all of the servers and mail content on
the network, so I do it as best I can.
I don't mind saying, it has caused a bigger mess over the years,
especially in the name of spam.
I assume you're talking about false-positive bounces caused by IP
blacklisting, challenge-response systems, etc. These all suck,
especially from an ISP's perspective, but something had to be done to
restore the utility of email for organizations. End-user content
filters may get 95+% of the junk, but that 0-5% is still an
overwhelming amount of crap.
ISPs, as a group, caused a big chunk of the problem we admins have to
deal with, by providing hosting and bandwidth to spammers. For a tidy
profit.
Of course, lazy admins contributed to the huge problem too, by
allowing all those virus-infected machines to spew spam and
virus-laden email. But consumers PCs are mostly to blame for that.
So in the end, we all suck eggs together.