OK, I'll raise my voice. I don't see this a problem. There used to be a tacit rule on usenet against posting private email, but even there it did not apply to insulting or harassing email. I am unaware of even an informal rule on FR against posting FReepmail.
Speaking for myself, I would generally err on the side of respecting someone's confidence, but would regard myself under no obligation to do so if the email were abusive, threatening, insulting, or otherwise objectionable. And I certainly would not apply some personal unwritten rule of this sort to others.
As I said, I have been on threads on the internet and boards for some ten years and have never seen such action. But even that is not relevant. It is decency and honor which keeps such things from being done. Those who violate that code as well as those who condone it have none.
And that while that is part of the reason why I call the agreement a farce, it is not even half of the problem with it as those who are interested can easily see in the links I provided in my most recent post above.
PRIVATE
Ive' been out of town all weekend and am just catching up, so pardon if I don't know everything that's happened.
I got a freepmail way back before all the thread dropping started. It was very obvious that the sender had an agenda, and that was to disrupt these threads.
Now, in the last month or so I've had a number of discussions with Alamo, both public and private. I have had to reconsider the effect of phrases like "blue spew". I am genuinely happy that such phrases are explicitly considered unacceptable.
But there is a particular style of argument that encouraged such insults, and that style involves making accusations not so much against Freepers ans against the whole scientific community. It is one thing to argue that conventional ideas are wrong; quite another to insist that the whole community is withholding data, lying about data which is within anybody's means to check. I would suggest that when you take on the entire scientific establishment, you need to be cautious about how you phrase your arguments -- if you expect to be taken seriously.
Perhaps I can speak to this. I received some truly foul and abusive freepmails some time ago, and my preferred response at the time was simply to post the freepmails in public, allowing folks to see what sort of person this poster actually was when he/she thought nobody else was looking. But before I did, I popped off a freepmail of my own to the admin moderator, asking about the appropriateness of posting private mails in public - the response I got was that while there was an informal, unwritten rule about that sort of thing, violations were considered essentially bad form, rather than as serious offenses deserving some sort of official sanction. However, in a case like the one I described, the moderator was doubtful that anyone would find my posting of the mails to be inappropriate, and that I should therefore let my own conscience guide me as to whether or not these private mails should be posted in public.