E-mail Privacy

[David Hoopes]

In article <8114 at ecs.soton.ac.uk> tjc at ecs.soton.ac.uk (Tim Chown) writes:
>
>Sometimes the mail system, sendmail in our case, fails due to an
>error of some sort.  It's quite rare but as our postmaster I
>redirect failed headers to me so I can attempt to prevent
>similar failures and notify senders/intended recipients
>of the problem and perhaps the cause.
>
>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

I would turn them in to their professors.  I would also tell the professors
that E-MAIL can be forged so this could be from someone else with an ax
to grind.

If you worked for company x and while a co-worker was on vacation you went
to get something out of his/her desk.  Something that you needed to 
conduct regular bussines.  If you found a set of ledgers that indicated that
the person was cheating the company or the companys clients would you put 
the ledgers back and tell them that that wasn't a nice thing to do or would
you present the ledger to the company officals and let them deal with the
person.

As a system admin it isn't your job to snoop through users mail to find out
if they are cheating.  However, when in the course of doing your duties, ie
fixing mail headers, you find something that clearly shows that students are
cheating then you should act on it.  




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David Hoopes                              Tallgrass Technologies Inc. 
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