E-mail Privacy

[Todd Hooper]

In article <8114 at ecs.soton.ac.uk>, tjc at ecs.soton.ac.uk (Tim Chown) writes:

> Anyway, as a result I saw a message between two students that
> was clearly showing them to be cheating in an assigment by exchanging
> pieces of code.  I only saw the subject line, but it was enough.
> Do you turn a blind eye?  Do you let the offenders gain an unfair
> advantage?  It's not at all clear cut.  We have correlation software
> written as the basis as a PhD that checks for collaboration on the
> structure of code, but when you have the extra "proof" should you
> root (literally ;-) around further?  Tricky.

Personally, I totally ignore the 'subject' header of bounced mail. In this
case, I would have ignored it as well. It is the job of academic staff to
uncover plagiarism - not mine. I think a consistent policy of enforcing privacy
is the best defense. If it is known that you might read mail, or interpret the
contents in some way (even if this only involves looking at the subject line)
then you may leave yourself open to more problems (e.g. why didn't you stop
this hacker mailing /etc/passwd to someone?).

Most mailers have the 'headers-only' facility, when bouncing mail to the
postmaster. This should really be a default on mailers, since I can't think of
a single case where I have needed to look at the body of a message.

I can't see how you could be alerted to the contents by the subject - what sort
of student would be dumb enough to put a subject like 'Here is a copy of my
assignment...' ;-)

--
Todd Hooper (Postmaster)                                   Computing Centre
                                            Curtin University of Technology
                                                          Western Australia
Internet : hooper_ta at cc.curtin.edu.au
Phone    : +61 9 351 7467 (24 hour messaging system) Fax +61 9 351 2673