On 18 May 2020, at 11:50, yuv wrote:
To claim successful delivery and silently discard a message is a lie.
A 250 reply to end-of-data is not a claim of final delivery. Even if there's following text that seems to assert that the message is delivered, it has always been true that one cannot rely on that delivery being to a final destination which is readily accessible to the intended recipient.
The legal term is *misrepresentation*
It is not misrepresentation. The SMTP protocol definitions have NEVER required the 250 reply to end-of-data to indicate actual (much less final) delivery and has ALWAYS explicitly cautioned against reliance in any way on the optional text part of any server reply.
and I am eagerly waiting for the client coming through my door who has been damaged by an email service operator that replied with a 250 and then silently discarded the message.
I am not a lawyer in any sense and so cannot give any legal advice worth taking, however I have been peripherally involved in civil suits under US law which have touched on this issue in their pre-trial phases and I believe that you would be wise to research relevant precedents before taking on that hypothetical client, and especially to not take on such a client on a contingent fee basis.
I can't do that research for you or even point at any case where non-delivery of Internet email has been an issue at trial or in appeals. If you practice in the US, I know that 47 U.S. Code § 230 can be relevant but may or may not be in any particular case.
It is one of the main reasons why we lawyers continue to use fax transmission: the protocol is reliable, my fax device receives the equivalent of a 250, I can rely on the fact that something has been delivered. Not silently discarded.
A wise practice. On the other hand, the fax acknowledgement does not normally guarantee that the fax machine does not feed directly into a shredder or incinerator, or simply that there wasn't a fatal paper jam or ink mishap in the fax machine's printer. However, the fact that fax acknowledgements are generally considered reliable is largely a consequence of laws like the US TCPA (and the abuses prior to regulation.)
In 30 years of working with Internet email, I have never seen any fully automated mechanism for making its delivery reliable in general, non-contracted cases. Proposals for that have always failed in some fashion due to the fact that there's no universal standard mechanism for how email is handled after it leaves the realm of SMTP. Spammers (and the slightly broader population of people who fear being seen as spammers) have sought mechanisms to automatically verify addresses for decades and have only succeeded in making it increasingly true that the only way to confirm any email address as being delivered to a human is to send it email and get a clearly human-written reply. Even that verification is valid for just that one message.
There is no virtual replacement for a physical process server. Maybe someday that will mean robots of some sort (e.g. drones) but
-- Bill Cole b...@scconsult.com or billc...@apache.org (AKA @grumpybozo and many *@billmail.scconsult.com addresses) Not For Hire (currently)
