copyrights and publishing correspondence

[Kali]

Who owns RECIEVED e-mails or letters?

I was involved in a big fight to open up a membership-based organization from a bunch of well, I'll refrain from the name-calling for now, but one of the things I would do to try and draw them out into the daylight was to send an e-mail and cc to a yahoo discussion board. Sometimes they would reply back to the board, but other times they would deliberately reply back only to me. So I always replied back with the cc back in place (noted at my signature) and never trimmed the e-mail so that the whole exchange would always be public.

If someone ASKED me to keep something confidential, of course I always tried to do that while giving a paraphrased report of the information.

I'm wondering how those exchanges that were started by me, cc'd to a public forum, and then replied "privately" but not requested to be private, and finally re-replied (or even longer exchanges) by me would shake out legally?