Jorgensen.org.uk

As everybody else, spam gets on my nerves. But that's not what I'm ranting about.

This rant is about the strange junk that many corporate email servers, add to be bottom of all outgoing emails.

Email disclaimers are worthless, annoying, and wastefull.

I am not a solicitor (American translation: lawyer), so none of this should be taken as legal advice. It is merely my opinion.

What Are They?

Email disclaimers are often appended to the end of outgoing corporate emails by the mail servers. Here is an example of one:

This electronic transmission is strictly confidential and intended solely for the addressee. If you are not the intended addressee, you must not disclose, copy or take any action in reliance of this transmission. If you have received this transmission in error it would be helpful if you could notify BigCompanyName as soon as possible.

or:

This email is confidential, may be legally privileged, and is for the intended recipient only. Access, disclosure, copying, distribution, or reliance on any of it by anyone else is prohibited and may be a criminal offense. Please delete if obtained in error and email confirmation to the sender.

or:

This email and any attachments is privileged and confidential and intended for the addressee at the specified email address only. Its contents may not be copied or disclosed to anyone other than the intended recipient. If this email is received in error please notify the sender immediately, delete it from your inbox and do not disclose its contents to another person. The contents of this email and/or attachments may not reflect the views and opinions of BigCompanyName.

I'm sure you get the idea.

Why are they Worthless?

By my definition, something is worthless if the advantages it brings is less than the cost it incurs.

I believe that they are worthless for several reasons:

• They are not enforceable. I believe that I can only be bound by two things:

  • What is given by law. As far as I know, the laws in most countries are blissfully ignorant of email disclaimers.
  • What I have explicitly agreed to. And since I tend to read email starting from the stop, I will already have read the email by the time I am presented with the disclaimer. So I cannot agree to the disclaimer before I read the email. E.g. compare with DVDs: They insist (very annoyingly) on having their disclaimers at the beginning. If having a disclaimer at the very end was sufficient, why annoy your customers like that? (never mind the annoying advertising on DVDs...)

  In other words: they provide the sender with a false sense of security. That might be a good thing though :-)

  So: regardless of how the disclaimer is phrased, the reader cannot be bound by it, simply because it is plastered at the bottom of emails.

• They add noise. Most emails are pretty short - which means that the disclaimers will take up a disproprotionally large part of the mail. This is not only annoying for the reader, they also increase the storage and bandwidth requirements.

• Nobody reads them. Have you ever read an EULA?
  I didn't think so...
  The authors know this. And yet they are used...

• They take bandwidth. Lets do the math. Lets assume that most mails are in HTML and are about 15 lines long:

  Email Size

  	Plain Text	HTML	Total	Percentage
  Contents: 15 lines of 60 characters	900	1350	2250	56.25%
  Email signature	200	300	500	12.50%
  Disclaimer	500	750	1250	31.25%
  Total	1600	2400	4000

  So disclaimers take up nearly a third of the bandwidth used by email. That's a lot of overhead. But at least it pales in significance to the HTML overhead (or spam for that sake).

The "worthlessness" increases even more when you have a close look at the phrases used in them:

• "strictly confidential"

  Although this phrase is usually targetted at the recipient, the email can easily be intercepted (and disclosed) by others:

  • Hopefully the sender has secured his machine and premises against snooping, e.g. Tempest, people looking over their shoulders and the like.

  • Not only can the email be read by the mail administrator on all servers it passes through, some systems actually actively monitor email: The US has at least two world-wide monitoring systems: Echelon and Carnivore.

  • Some companies automatically make copies of all incoming and outgoing email: If the recipient is in such a company, there will be yet another potential snooper.

  Adding "strictly confidential" to all outgoing messages also presents problems with information that is not confidential:

  • Press Releases: If your email to your journalist friend has such a disclaimer, then he/she cannot publish your press release.
  • External Support: If you send an email to an external supplier asking for help on some issue, then the recipient cannot enlist the help of his/hers colleagues to help you - that would probably mean revealing "confidential" information.
  • Public Forums: Messages you post here are hardly confidential; a disclaimer here will merely make you look bad.

  Bottom line: unencrypted email is not suitable for confidential information. If you want confidentiality, use encryption. If it is not confidential, then the disclaimer should not say so.

• "... for the intended recipient only"

  I'm willing to argue that I am the intended recipient of anything that ends up in my inbox. So if Anne sends an email to Bert, who then forwards it to me, the I am the intended recipient, regardless of what Anne thought.

  Since the phrase does not specify whose intentions are being referred to, this makes it very vague.

  The phrase also assumes that the actual recpient is physic: How can the recipient distinguish between intentional emails and accidental emails? The sender could have selected the wrong entry from the address book. Not all emails start with "Dear Fred"...

  Since the disclaimer is added automatically, it may also be appended to the bottom of any viruses the sender is suffering from. Assuming that the sender did not intend to send me the virus, I cannot even divulge to my local tech support team which virus it is - because I have no reason to think that they are the "intended recipient". Luckily I run Linux, so all those Microsoft LookOut viruses are merely annoying...

  Bottom line: If you want to make sure that only the intended recipient can read the email, use encryption.

• "...not intended addressee ... may not copy..."

  So: if I get this email by mistake, then I cannot even copy it to my Trash folder?

  Copying is exactly all mail servers do. Mail "moves" by each mail server sending a copy to the next one - only when the recieving mail server says "Yep: I've got it now" the original is deleted. Or at least: The polite mail servers delete the original...

• "... not intended recipient ... may not take any action in reliance of this transmission"

  This phrase seems to be intended to prevent snoopers from taking any action based on the email - which is fair enough.

  But that depends on how the word "action" is meant to be interpreted. Which items below are action?

  • Notifying the sender ? That is probably an action that would be appreciated by the sender - simply to prevent the sender from making the same mistake again.
  • Deleting the email? This might be interpreted as an action...
  • Leaving it in your inbox Definitely a non-action. But who wants mail like that lingering forever in their inboxes?

• "... please delete if obtained in error"

  This is probably the only part of the disclaimers that can hold any water whatsoever. But since it is phrased as a polite request rather than a demand it cannot possibly be considered binding.

  But... If you were to obtain it from somebody else's inbox, should it be delete from there too?

Why are people using them?

Short answer: I don't know. I simply do not know. Obviously, they have not read this page, or applied their mental muscles to them.

A more realistic answer might be: "Because everybody else are". And this is difficult to argue against. My analogy is "2000 lemmings cannot be wrong"...

Some people appear to think that they give some small level of legal protection, But the real reason is probably to "convey a professional image": it really helps when it comes to making a small company look like a big retarded bureaucracy.

How do we stop this madness?

With great difficulty.

You could direct the sender to read this page, or any of the following:

• Email Disclaimers: FAQ

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