……..
The ISP would maintain a record of which messages had or hadn't been downloaded anyway, but this doesn't necessarily prove that the intended recipient had actually received the message - a 3rd-party may have either accessed the POP3 account beforehand or acted as a fake-proxy in some way. Obviously, in places like the UK this falls under the remit of something like RIPA (was this ever actually implemented, BTW?)
Although legally questionable, there is no reason why applications couldn't automatically send a read receipt acknowledgement without the user knowing - the current implementation (whereby the recipient opts-in) is practically worthless, but given how easy it is in general to interfere with Internet connections a read receipt could never really pass as legal evidence to my mind. But, while not being "smoking guns", read receipts may be admissable if corrobated by more substantial evidence (possibly through key-stroke surveillance).
Don't forget as well that for every mass-market mail app on the market there is a freeware, hacker variant - and you can't effectively legislate against this kind of software even if you do persuade the big boys to sign up )
Neil
If you did have an automatic received receipt its also possible that spammers could use this fdunction to test if an email was active. I don't belive people would accept this situation.
Alan
Judging by the list of "other" email addresses that have been CC'd on my junk mail, it would appear that some of the spammers are just generating random mail addresses and sending it off anyway - regardless of whether the address is live or not. In any case, I would imagine their scripts are designed to automatically scan bounced-back messages and pick out any of the addresses contained in them and then remove them from their database - this would take about 5 minutes programming in Perl or similar roll
This brings me on to a wider point - apart from the obvious sales scam emails, are all these junk messages just designed to cripple the network? I also think that some ISPs are not properly getting to grips with the problem - the amount of bandwidth used to send all this must be phenomenal…
However, keeping in with the forensic/legal theme, does anyone know what the position is if somebody sent you (for example) an illegal image or file that you obviously didn't request? From my understanding, you have already effectively made a copy of the file as soon as your machine downloaded the message. Any thoughts?
Neil
dodginess that is a valid point!
I would contact your ISP, and they can deal with it. Because it is on their computers as well as yours, they have more time and have procedures in place for dealing with this sort of thing.
If I am wrong on this one, please correct me!