BU offers lifetime email forwarding. So does Cal, and earlier this year I'd started updating my contact information with the Cal forwarding alias. Bad idea. Unbeknownst to me the vendor providing this service had put a spam filter on it. And it wasn't a very good one. I don't know the full extent of its wrongful blocking, but as I was planning my China trip it became clear that it was blocking every single email that originated in Asia. And it wasn't just filtering them into a box I could review; it just bounced them all back to the sender.
Thanks but no thanks. This isn't even slightly useful. And it completely negates any purpose of lifetime forwarding. The idea is that with the single address you won't lose touch with your correspondents. But if it blocks the email of those very correspondents you most certainly will lose touch with them.
So I complained, and they fixed it. But there was an interesting tangent to all this. At the bottom of the tech support person's email was a stock disclaimer:
This Email is covered by the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, 18 U.S.C. Sections 2510-2521 and is legally privileged. The information contained in this Email is intended only for .[sic] If the reader of this message is not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distributions or copying of this communication is strictly prohibited. If you have received this communication in error, please notify us by telephone [at this number], and destroy the original message.
There are a couple of things to note about this disclaimer. One, the error ("is intended for .") Secondly, privileged??? The signature of the sender said they were an account director, not an attorney. And I don't remember, in all the work I did studying privileges, that there was an "account director" privilege.
But the thing that really caught my eye was the citation to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act. It's basically a 1986 addition to the 1968 Wiretap Act, which makes intercepting electronic communications illegal. (In fact, the citation seems inaccurate. ECPA amended sections of code (18 U.S.C. ยงยง 2510-2521) that had been created by the Wiretap Act, but ECPA is not the code sections itself. A more accurate way to have written the citation would have been with the language "as codified by" the code sections.) But I've never seen an email disclaimer that cites it as the authority for protecting mis-directed emails. Probably because it has absolutely no authority over it. At best, to the extent that the Wiretap Act protects emails, it protects them from interception. Having them delivered to your inbox would not likely count as "interception," and without that the Wiretap Act has no bearing on what happened to the email. (The Wiretap Act also has nothing to do with the concept of privilege.)
However, blocking and not delivering my email, that could very well constitute interception, impermissibly so under the Wiretap Act. For all intents and purposes, the Wiretap Act bars any interceptions of electronic communications except under a few enumerated circumstances. One of these circumstances, however, is maintenance. According to the vendor, it appears the reason the filter was used was because an influx of viruses had led to the vendor ending up on blacklists. It raises an interesting question of whether the maintenance exception would cover filtering for this purpose. But even if it were to, it seems to be a situation of killing a fly with a bazooka, to impose a filter that over-blocks with unnuanced rules, with no chance for review. And the fact that it is happening untransparently, with no user knowledge, does not help its case.
In any case, it's a complex and open issue as to how the Wiretap Act (as amended by ECPA) operates with respect to Internet communications. Way too complex and open to have been inserted into a disclaimer with any authority.