What does "legitimate" mean?

On Sat, Feb 28, 2004 at 03:36:07PM -0500, Alan DeKok wrote:
| 
|   If you believe some people, throwing away *any* legitimate email is
| a Mortal Sin, and is cause for all sorts of vilification.
| 
|   My opinion is that the recipient should decide how much legitimate
| email can be thrown away.  If someone thinks that doing so is a Mortal
| Sin, fine, but they shouldn't prevent *me* from doing so, and they
| shouldn't oppose the design or implemenation of systems which allow me
| to make that choice.

Yes, I think it is important to emphasize early that we are redefining
legitimacy as the product of two things: first, conformance to a
particular standard by which we can detect forgery, and second, a
consent relationship between the sender and the receiver.

As it is used today, "legitimate" is an ineffable notion.  Suppose I
write a letter to a friend on a piece of paper, then stick it in an
envelope but forget to address it.  While my friend might be perfectly
happy to receive the message, it is simply just not conformant to the
postal service.  The people on one side of this debate would say the
letter is legitimate.  The people on the other side would say it is not.

We need to get away from the fuzzy notion of "legitimacy" as an
intrinsic virtue and move towards the more easily determined notion of
standards conformance (forgery vs non-forgery).  Once we do that, the
question of consent is no longer our problem: it now belongs to the
interaction between sender, accreditor, receiver, and reputation system,
each of which are free to express their policies as they see fit.