I'm not an American, so it's basically "not my fairy-tale" (as we say in our country), but I can't stop wondering at the use of the word "label" in the proposed regulation.
I already asked (in a bit sarcastic tone) in one of the previous emails, what is a "label" in context of email in general. Because there's simply no such thing: if you look at email protocols, or operation of server software, there's no such thing as "label". Spam filters may add a *header* indicating that a message is spam, but is a header a "label" or not? And if the spam filter does not add a header, but just directly moves the message (using sieve for example) to spam *folder* on the server? Is a *physical folder in the filesystem* a "label" or not? "Labels" per se exist only in some implementations of MUAs, most notably in Gmail web interface. So either the regulation is targeted particularly at Google, or it's authors never saw any other email system than Gmail and imagine that a "label" is some universal thing (which wonders me, because don't they have their internal email systems at Congress or governmental institutions?) Another question is, how are the operators supposed to distinguish political messages from non-political ones? The only reasonable method that comes to mind is submitting by political senders in advance to the operators a list of sender addresses that shouldn't be filtered. Operators can then whitelist them. But can't compiling a list of such sender be considered some form of "applying a label"? In that cse the regulation becomes self-contradictory: in order to comply with the regulation and "not apply a label" to political messages, you have first to "apply a label" to senders of those messages, a label that says "don't apply any label to messages from this sender". Just some doubts that - at least for me - show that this entire proposal doesn't make any sense. -- Regards, Jaroslaw Rafa r...@rafa.eu.org -- "In a million years, when kids go to school, they're gonna know: once there was a Hushpuppy, and she lived with her daddy in the Bathtub." _______________________________________________ mailop mailing list mailop@mailop.org https://list.mailop.org/listinfo/mailop
