I am copying the list so everyone understands what's up with this issue,
and by the way, I agree with you, and will attempt to do better.
Any emails I send can end up as court exhibits, and could be subject to
sanctions and findings of acting in "bad faith" if it looks like I'm
redacting portions of them. Since we get sued by Novell at least once
per year, we have to produce massive amounts of email to their attorneys
during production requests. What you are talking about is "redacting" a
portion of the email thread. I have been personally fined by the
courts upwards of $100,000.00 per production requests for alleged
"missing" email fragments. Novell then tries to claim that somehow I
deliberately "destroyed" content to hide something (which can result in
a finding of bad faith conduct which carries with it treble damages).
There is something in the US Courts called the "Doctrine of
Spoilation". The way it reads is this. If you have destroyed evidence
(or appear to have destroyed evidence) then the other side can claim you
did so to conceal some bad conduct. For example, Novell could claim
that I was sending the NetWare source code to folks on the mailing list,
and that's why there were missing email fragments, to conceal this
theft. The judge then has the option of applying this doctrine, and can
issue a finding of fact that you destroyed what the other side was
looking for, whether or not you did or it even existed. I know it
sounds like BS, but that's the way the law reads, and I've been hit with
it before, and had to pay stiff fines for emails that had portions
redacted.
As such, I have this really bad habit of preserving everything within an
email message.
What this means is that I appreciate your comments, and will try to do
better. Hopefully, I won't get nailed for this the next time Novell
files on us ...... I will slice out the meat of the text, and try to
conform -- but I could get nailed for it.
Jeff
Erik Corry wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> I hope you will take this in the constructive spirit it is intended.
>
> You may not have noticed that you are consistently violating email
> conventions when communicating with Linux kernel developers. Like
> most Unix users they put the reply below the quoted text and remove
> everything apart from the text they are replying to. This keeps the
> conversation cronologically ordered and removes irrelevant text,
> keeping the email down to that part that is still relevant. This is
> how all Internet email was until a few years ago.
>
> On the principle that one should 'do as the Romans when in Rome' I
> would advise you to do the same. Your style is very irritating to
> Unix users.
>
> --
> Erik Corry erik@arbat.com
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