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Bill Stewart
It never fails to amaze me that complainers point out that an 'abusive' letter started out, "I hate niggersfaggotsjewsyou!" and then proceed to list the other fifty 'abusive' things that the writer had to say.
The real problem, besides the emotional distress some people feel at the abuse they get in response to forged postings, and the potential loss of reputation capital, is that people keep trying to call their ISP to get them shut down, and some ISPs do this sort of thing, squashing abusive-sounding customers first and asking questions later. Ok, soon-to-be-ex customers...
Any ISP that would react that way should probably be avoided, anyway.
Knee-jerk censorship like that is one of the best arguments around for
posting via remailers. Not to mention the fact that posting anonymously
prevents one's e-mail address from being misused in that fashion.
But personally, the most persuasive argument is to keep people from
compiling a de facto dossier on you based on your public postings, selling
it to potential employers, and perhaps keeping you from getting a certain
job because of your controversial, unpopular, and/or un-politically-correct
opinions.
IMO, people who rely on placebos like those "X-No-Archive" header flags
are fooling themselves if they think they will be universally honored.
Most so-called "forged postings" are rather crudely done, and the ones
done using a remailer to paste headers are the most obvious ones of all.
I'm not sure what the legal standard for "forgery" is, but if it's anything
like that for fraud, it requires that a REASONABLE PERSON would be fooled.
Given all the disclaimers present in the headers of remailer output, I
doubt that any posts with pasted From: would meet that standard.
Yes, I've heard the argument that "people don't read headers", but so what?
Most of them probably don't read the fine print on contracts, either, but
they're still responsible for what it says.
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Finger