From: wcs@anchor.ho.att.com (bill.stewart@pleasantonca.ncr.com +1-510-484-6204)
Date: Mon, 16 Jan 95 23:37:38 PST
To: hroller@metronet.com
Subject: Re: Abuse Complaint out of homer@rahul.net
Message-ID: <9501170734.AA09389@anchor.ho.att.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


Michael wrote, to Homer and the lists
>      I am going to have to agree with you on this.
> A Sysadmin would have to see the messages or data that is 
> supposed to be harassing the complainant.  What I say is harassment
> may be different from what you say it is.

There's different levels of harassment.  For the kind that says
1) "Don't send me any of this junk mail any more", 
if the recipient wants to define junk mail to the remailer-operator, 
there's no ethical problem if the operator wants to block remailed mail
to the recipient, though it's good form in non-remailer-chain
environments for the operator to issue a bouncegram if possible.
If the recipient has to pay per byte/message to receive mail,
or the amount transmitted is really excessive, then this is
certainly something an operator ought to do to avoid problems.

(It's potentially bad form for a for-profit operator to cash
digicash postage for delivering the messages if he doesn't,
at least without a warning in his pricing policy advertisment.)

If the operator doesn't want to block remail to an unwilling
recipient, the ethical and legal questions become more interesting.
The question of whether the "don't bug me" list gets published
is also interesting.

For the kind of harassment complaint that says 
2) "Block all remail to me from this destination",
there are implementation issues - can the remailer perform
checks like this before doing the header-munging?
Is there more security risk? Of course, with chaining,
it's a lot less useful.

For the kind of complaint that says
3) "Block all remail to this group of people",
there's the question of whether the requester is authorized
to request that for the entire group - newsgroups are an
especially interesting problem.  Julf's remailer blocks
posting to some newsgroups, because the readers have done
the usual net.poll and decided they'd like him to block it,
since lots of the remail was spam.  But especially with newsgroups,
it's easy for the recipient to trash incoming articles from the remailers.

		Bill