I agree that the “Thou shall not reveal the contents of any e-mail, regardless of content” rule is a standard net-convention, but one I don’t understand or agree with. I would never make public an e-mail where the mailer disagreed with me, even if the mailer was vehement about it, but if someone “spams” me with unwanted hate mail, I have no problem exposing the roach for what he is.
Again, just to be clear, I understand that e-mail is private, but I think that hate e-mails (obcenities, personal attacks, threats, abuse) etc. are fair game for public exposure and ridicule.
It depends on whether or not it is spam. That is, spam being sent to more than one person with the intent of inflaming or advertising. In that case, the spammer meant it to be public, and the spam itself is fair game.
But if was targeted to only one person, then it was not meant for public dissemination. No matter how vitriolic it was, leave it private.
I can see keeping it private, as in not posting it on a public bulletin board.
On the other hand, that doesn’t mean not showing it to anyone. I’ve never received any kind of threatening or abusive e-mail, but if I did, it is entirely likely I would be sharing it with the webmaster of the place from which it originated and/or the law enforcement authorities.
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Bad choice of words on my part. I meant spam to mean “unsolicited e-mail”. Your definition is better.
Could you explain why? As stated, my inclination is to hold the hate-mailer up to public ridicule. It seems to me that by keeping it private, you’re somehow giving…power?..control?..to the hate-mailer.
If it is hate e-mail, I don’t see a need to respect the sender’s wishes or privacy.
I think that the fact that most people do treat all e-mail as private gives a few people the freedom to vent their spleen without public reprisal.
Legally, IIRC, once a letter is received it becomes the property of the recipient, thus allowing people to sell or re-distribute it at will. While the writing inside is still the intellectual property of the writer, the actual letter itself is the property of the recipient.
By that same standard, I would believe it to be perfectly legal to re-distribute a received e-mail. The ethical and moral issue is entirely different; while I don’t particularly understand TVeb’s reasons, I think it is completely her choice as to whether she should post the information contained.
I eagerly await Bricker or DSYoungEsq to bust me up the side of my head with the correct information regarding the legality of re-distributing received mail.
Fenris, I totally understand your inclination to hold a hate-mailer up to public scrutiny, but I see problems with it. For one thing, you are presenting a one-sided view of the argument, and possibly editing it for comment. You are also presenting it out of context. Last year on snopes we uncovered just such a situation. Here is the outcome:
Another example is the Landover Baptist Church. They have a guestbook, and they claim that they do not edit what people write. They lie about this, and make some people look much worse than they really are.
Also, what you might consider completely offensive may not be to the person that sent it to you.
How strongly do I feel this way? Well, the 3 most important factors to consider are context, context, and context. If someone you don’t know sends you something completely hateful and unreasonable, or makes threats, then yes, hang the bastard out to dry.
Could be more specific on the particular bit of hate-mail that we are discussing, and under what circumstances it was received? That might well change my mind.
First of all, thanks for the Snopes link. I’d never read that particular one (The “Bryan Winter” e-mail) and it does raise some interesting issues about unintended consequences of publicizing private e-mail.
In any case, I was just talking about hate-mail in general, not a specific piece or incident, and the generally accepted idea that all e-mail, regardless of content, must remain private.
However, a “fer instance” that comes to mind that I’ve experienced personally was in response to an off-handed comment I made on a comic-book newsgroup. Someone was asking about when a specific author took over a comic (I no longer remember the details) and I responded with something like “Issue X. I remember because I hated it so much that I quit buying it at issue X+1”. I got an e-mail from the group’s resident troll saying something like “You fing loser! Why dont you grow up and move out of youre parents basment and then you’d be able to understand why (new author) rockz. Fer.”
I had no moral qualms about A)reporting the troll to his ISP, B)sending the Troll a warning not to e-mail me again and C)reprinting his post on the board, which caused him some discomfort from the ridicule (as well as a bunch of pre-emptive “Don’t ever e-mail me” messages.
My reasoning was that he wasn’t trying to discuss something with me privately, he was simply using e-mail to attack. I think that’s the criteron I’d use: discussions, even heated discussions, convey information, attacks don’t. And I don’t see a need to respect the privacy of people who use e-mail for unsolicited attacks.
In that particular instance, I think you handled it well, but I would have taken a slightly different route - I would have warned him first, and if he sent even one more e-mail that wasn’t a complete apology, I would have made good on my promise. But I think you gave a fer-instance that justified your actions.
Here’s another fer-instance. A list member of a mailing list insulted another member. Words were bandied back and forth, and I finally e-mailed the offending party and said something like “hey, let’s take this off-line so that we don’t bother the other listers. I think that you owe such and such an apology.” I was much wordier than that, but I was always polite. We e-mailed each other several times a day for a few days, and while we both remained gentlemen, things got out of hand pretty quickly. His last response to me went out to the entire list, and he snipped my better comments out, and essentially called me a crybaby. That was extremely embarrassing.
So here is a case where I think it is absolutely inappropriate to share a private e-mail with the public. BTW, he got flamed royally for that.
I feel strongly that noone should be allowed to use the social taboo that “Email is always private” to make you into an accomplice. If someone speaking to me starts to tell me something that I don’t want to know I can stop them before they actually get the words out. Unsolicited email robs you of this. If someone were to send me email that contained information that was potentially dangerous (I could get in trouble for knowing it, were it discovred latter that I had known it and said nothing) I would have no compuntion about revealing it, provided I had not given the sender any previous reason to think that I was in their confidance. Just as if someone were to walk up to me on the street and blurt out something, I wouldn’t think of it as particularly confidential or private–I would certainly feel free to tell my boyfrind or friends about the encounter later, if I felt it worth mentioning.
Hey, Bricker and DSYoungEsq aren’t the only lawyers on the board!
When someone sends you a letter by snail-mail, the piece of paper it is written on is yours, and therefore you can sell the document itself to a collector later if you’ve gotten a letter from some celebrity.
The actual text, however, as you said, remains the intellectual property of the person who wrote it. This means that while you can sell the document itself, you can not publish it, such as reproduce it in a book, without the author’s permission.
With e-mail, seeing as you wouldn’t have an actual document, you would have anything to sell anyone. I suspect re-publication of e-mail without the author’s permission would put you at risk of some kind of suit.
Of course, considering how much value the typical e-mail has, I wouldn’t be concerned about the amount of damages. Heck, posting the spam I get in a public place would probably make the senders happy because they’d be reaching a larger audience.