Intended recipient

[Brian Morrison]

On Tue, 13 Sep 2011 11:02:58 +0100
Roland Perry <lists at internetpolicyagency.com> wrote:

> In article <002501cc71f4$2c3547f0$849fd7d0$@net>, James Firth 
> <james2 at jfirth.net> writes
> >> Would the activity of these researchers (or malicious
> >> counterparts) be an interception in the UK; and as they've
> >> modified the public DNS to do this, is it an interception on a
> >> public network and therefore criminal?
> >
> >"Modified the public DNS", in that they lawfully purchased internet
> >domains...
> >
> >They may have violated trademarks, or indeed be guilty of fraud
> >(?impersonation?), but don't see how this can be interception.
> 
> It's difficult, isn't it! Their stated aim was to intercept (small i) 
> emails, of course.

Not as such, they are only "intercepting" email that otherwise would
have been marked as a failed delivery because there was no MX record
for the incorrect domain name.

They could have done this without storing the message bodies, all they
were interested in were the headers which their mail server
legitimately processed. It should be sufficient to simply list the
number of incorrectly addressed emails they received.

-- 

Brian Morrison