OT: Legal "disclaimers" and e-mail

[Kenneth Brody]

Quoting Fairlight (Fri, 28 Sep 2007 20:33:53 -0400):
[...]
> You're actually (IANAL, but from every discussion I've ever had on the
> subject, I believe this to be true) free to do whatever the heck you want
> with anything that hits your mailbox, no matter what boilerplate says,
> unless it is covered under some kind of NDA or other contract to which you
> previously willfully bound yourself.  It's just like receiving unsolicited
> USPS, from what I've gathered.

 From what I understand, you are correct.  But, unless they've annoyed me
enough, I wouldn't even bother doing something like forwarding it just
for the sake of forwarding it.

[...]
> And for as flippant as I am about the matter, I've been remarkably
> restrained.  I semi-regularly get traffic intended for fairlite.com.au
> (Fairlight Plastics, PTY, in Australia), complete with spreadsheets, order
> information, etc.  I'm actually fairly nice in that I -usually- inform
> them that it's been mis-sent, and tell them where to send it.  Last half
> year or so I've stopped doing even that, however.

Well, as I said, when I first started getting sales-related e-mails from
South America, in Spanish, totally unrelated to filePro or anything else
that might be relevant to Laura's website, and those e-mails looked like
legitimate messages that were simply misaddressed, I took the time to
figure out what might have happened.  In this case, the address should
have been to hvcomputers.com, a Dominican Republic-based company.  I
sent an e-mail in reply, in both English and Babelfish Spanish, telling
them what had apparently happened.  I figured the Babelfish translation
should be understandable enough to fix the problem, and the English
original should help if they had trouble.  (Or, they could have always
replied that the didn't fully understand what I was saying.)  However,
when I continued to get e-mail from them, this time addressed to both
hvcomputer.com _and_ the intended hvcomputers.com, and a few more
replies from me demanding that they remove all hvcomputer.com addresses
from their mailings, yet they continued to arrive, I decided to simply
start reporting everything they sent as spam.  (The consensus at SpamCop
was in agreement, especially since I had requested to be removed from
their mailings.  The original messages were in a gray area.)

> I figure that enabling
> their lack of diligence is really silly--let them figure out themselves by
> delays in their order processing or costings or whathaveyou that they've
> screwed up.  I don't have the patience, nor do I have the responsibility to
> redirect fouled email.  If they want the service, they can damned well pay
> me to do it.  Apparently my advancing years combined with repetition are
> making me grumpier about it than I used to be.

Sounds good to me.

I wonder if sending them a bill for my services would do anything?  (Not
that I would really expect any money to come my way, of course.)

Hey, if they can have a unilateral statement at the end of their e-mail,
why not send them a bill for their agreeing to your unilateral rates
for reading their misdirected messages?

[...]

-- 
KenBrody at BestWeb dot net        spamtrap: <g8ymh8uf001 at sneakemail.com>
http://www.hvcomputer.com
http://www.fileProPlus.com