Peekee wrote: > If I am foolish enough to allow >other people/Players to send email as if from me. Then those messages >should be considered as being sent from me.
Who sent the message is an interesting philosophical question. We've always accepted messages being sent with some degree of automation in their composition, and messages initiated by a cron job, as being sent by the responsible person. In that case the message is devised and ultimately controlled by the mind of the person who it purports to be sent by. Your situation is a bit different: the message's content, and the decision of when to send it, is controlled by some party other than who the message claims in its From: header. I thought for a while that you were going to claim that the messages going through your system were sent by whoever used the HTTP interface, and that it was a way to anonymously send messages to the PF. Agora had an incident with anonymity back in 1994 or 1995, I don't know what the outcome was. I imagined that we'd have a message such as "I vote FOR proposal 5678" without knowing who sent it. Would be an interesting test of R478. Until recently we had a definition of "by private message" that referred to "an appropriate private message", and if we had a similar definition for "by announcement" then I'd have argued that an anonymous announcement is not suitable for performing any game action. As things are I'd make much the same argument, but without such close reference to the rule text. I think it is instructive to compare your system against a hypothetical system that accepted an email address for the From: line as well as message content. In that case, assuming users enter their own addresses reliably, it would appear that you were transmitting messages to the PF on the users' behalf. It would be pretty clear that you were not, and were not claiming to be, the author of the messages. This was, in fact, the role of the Distributor in early Agora. The fact that messages sent through your HTTP interface claim to be from you, rather than claiming to be anonymous, raises new issues. We have a disparity between the From: line and actual message authorship. I'm inclined to treat the From: header as a statement of authorship for the purposes of R2149, as that's the official semantic of that header in RFC 2822. So if the user is sending the message via your system, in the knowledge that the From: line will show you, then e is violating R2149, as e would if e independently sent email with your address falsely in the From: header. On the other hand, perhaps it is you that is making the false statement regarding authorship. I think you could be held responsible for the From: header even if we regard the body as being a message from the user. I was also wondering about whether your system might modify messages on the way through. Swedish Chef filter was the obvious choice, but potentially you might subtly alter certain parts of message bodies (such as vote values). Is there a responsibility for players to repudiate messages that have been delivered inaccurately? -zefram
