[Gllug] [OT] spam accident

[Simon Wilcox]

On Thu, 19 May 2005, Tom Schutzer-Weissmann wrote:

> Someone at work receives emails from an organisation who sent one
> particular email to about 200 people. The email somehow "got replicated"
> and filled up our POP server and many others with 1000s of copies of
> itself.

There is a slightly gray legal area here that you might be able to use to
scare them into action.

If that list contains personal email addresses, and if the email was sent
from a business or other entity thay should be registered under the DPA,
then you might claim that putting the addresses in the to or cc fields
constitutes "unauthorised disclosure" which is technically illegal.

Now, it's a gray area because afaik it's never been tested and in any
event it seems that the DPA does not apply to business data, e.g. who you
work for, what your office address is, what your *work* email address is,
only to personal information so the list would have to include personal
email addresses. Again, afaik it's never been tested, but it might be a
useful stick to wave at them if you don't mind coming across like a bit of
a privacy bigot :-)

Simon.

-- 
"Bambleweeny 57 Submeson Brain"

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