Rule Changed Regarding Posting of Personal Correspondence

This rule:

Posting of personal correspondence between yourself and another party whether it be from email or from private messages is not allowed. The only exception to this is if you get permission from the author, this permission must be posted by the author of the email or PM within the thread where you wish to quote the personal correspondence.

Has been changed too:

Posting of personal correspondence between yourself and another party whether it be from email or from private messages is not allowed unless you have permission from the author and they are a member here. This includes email that has been forwarded to you. This permission must be sent to the Admin or Mod via PM before you post the correspondence.

There's legal issues involved with this including copyright and privacy laws which will vary by state hence the reason for the rule change.

I can't help but wonder if this goes back to the privacy act of 1934. When I received my commercial radiotelephone licence 40 years ago I remember signing a statement relating to the privacy act of 1934. It had to do with devulging private information that you were entrusted with to send by radio. As I recall you could go to prison for breaking it.

As far as the copyright goes anything you write can fall under copyright law so it most certainly applies to e-mail too. From the research I've done there is no cases where someone sent an email that was copied and they sued in court so you have to assume they are copyrighted... I don't want to be the test case. There's other issues as well, for some services in the fine print you'll find non-disclosure agreements etc.

As for the privacy laws thats a "cluster" and I'm not even going to begin to try and decipher it. Simpler to just not allow it.