An Analysis Of Email Disclaimers

akintayo writes "Recently more amd more organisations have required email sent from their accounts to contain an attached disclaimer. This disclaimer is supposed to describe the recipient's rights to 'use' that email. This slate article analyzes the legality and impact of one such disclaimer, and finds it somewhat lacking."

Dumbest disclaimer?

[BabyDave]

"If you are not the intended recipient, please delete this message unread"

Of course, it was at the bottom of the e-mail.

Re:Limit this crap to four lines...

[Jesrad]

There's finely a use for the "Burn before reading" Top Secret classification !

stupid disclaimers

[colinleroy]

IMPORTANT: This email is intended for the use of the individual addressee(s) named above and may contain information that is confidential, privileged or unsuitable for overly sensitive persons with low self-esteem, no sense of humour or irrational religious beliefs. If you are not the intended recipient, any dissemination, distribution or copying of this email is not authorised (either explicitly or implicitly) and constitutes an irritating social faux pas. Unless the word absquatulation has been used in its correct context somewhere other than in this warning, it does not have any legal or grammatical use and may be ignored. No animals were harmed in the transmission of this email, although the yorkshire terrier next door is living on borrowed time, let me tell you. Those of you with an overwhelming fear of the unknown will be gratified to learn that there is no hidden message revealed by reading this warning backwards, so just ignore that Alert Notice from Microsoft: However, by pouring a complete circle of salt around yourself and your computer you can ensure that no harm befalls you and your pets. If you have received this email in error, please add some nutmeg and egg whites and place it in a warm oven for 40 minutes. Whisk briefly and let it stand for 2 hours before icing.
(Lifted from http://www.goldmark.org/jeff/stupid-disclaimers/ [goldmark.org])

Re:from the i cant spell department..

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah? Well "can't" and "cant" are two different words so there! Oh, and you forgot to start a sentence with a capital letter, and you forgot to capitalise the "i".

Sometimes you get your ass bitten if you're a pedantic bastard.

Re:Limit this crap to four lines...

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

You bankers, and your "fancy lunches". Will you be having it on my money, then?

spam too

[mabu]

I just got a spam message that had this at the bottom:

This message is intended only for the use of the individual or entity to which it is addressed and may contain information that is privileged, confidential and exempt from disclosure under applicable law. If you have received this message in error, you are hereby notified that we do not consent to any reading, dissemination, distribution or copying of this message. If you have received this communication in error, please notify the sender immediately and destroy the transmitted information.

Of course, all the header info is forged, so now I'm freaking out since I can't get in touch with them to let them know that this sensitive penis creme enlargement trade secret information may have fallen into the wrong hands!

Favorite disclaimer:

[Henrik S. Hansen]

Favorite disclaimer:

The goatse.cx lawyer has informed us that we need a warning! So.. if you are under the age of 18 or find this photograph offensive, please don't look at it. Thank you!

Re:Limit this crap to four lines...

[haystor]

I like the ones that tell you to delete all copies of the message. Is that implicit permission to access their mail servers for deletion?

What is the legal basis?

[brunes69]

Putting a disclaimer at the bottom of a message is utterly ridiculous. It is like posting a biuig notice on the side of a building, then at the bottom adding "This message is (c) Foobar, anyone reading it agress to pay me 5 million dollars". You have to stipulate terms of a license *before* the licensed product, not after.

To realy get them, why not add the following reply to your SMTP HELO response on your mailserver: "Any email sent to this system is considered the personal property of Foobar, and all rights and copyrights associated with said email are automatically assigned to Foobar. Your use of this system constitutes acceptance of this agreement."

It would be just as ridiculous as the email signatures.

Mission Impossible

[Anonymous Coward]

DISCLAIMER:

This email will self destruct your computer in 5 seconds!

5...
4...
3...
2...
1...
If not using Outlook, Please click on attachment "EvilVirus.vbs"

What next disclaimers on slahshot messages

[ad0gg]

----

This message is property of ad0gg or his affiliates. No moderator should mod down this message in any form or manner. No poster should use in whole or in part this message, if poster intent is to slander the owner of the message.

Whatever.

[Gannoc]

ATTENTION: If your name is not John P. Smith, by reading this message you agree to shove a pen in your eye.

Re:Limit this crap to four lines...

[NanoGator]

"We had a rule that anything more than four lines was absolutely unnacceptable. It annoyed the recipients, was too long for most people to read and had only questionable enforcement value anyway. It was a fairly common rule of thumb at the time, but as you say it appears to have been abandoned. "

Heh. Not totally related to what you've said, but it reminded me of it. At my previous job, somebody sent an email to my office mate. It was meant for me. He tapped my shoulder and said "Well I think this email was supposed to be for you, but the disclaimer says I cannot show it to anybody that it's not intended for." So I read his disclaimer, and he was right. By forwarding it to me, he'd violate those terms. Heh we had a chuckle at that.

So how'd it end? Not very excitingly, really. We just used a little common sense, assumed he wouldn't care, and forwarded the message to me anyway.

Re:If you have received this message in error...

[Anonymous Coward]

That is, you can't go out and beat someone up with a billy club someone sends you in the mail, because that would otherwise violate the law, but you're free to use it as a billy club even if the company who sent it to you says it's a sex toy for cows.

Dude, how the hell did you get on a mailing list that sends out stuff like *that*?!?

Official Celebrity Disclaimers

[platypibri]

Britany Spears-"Opps, I sent it again."
Michael Jackson-"This message is inteneded for receipients 12 and under. Otherwise please disregard without reading."
George W. Bush -"Any email from Iraq will be considered a WMD, weapon of mass dissemination, and will be immediately acted upon with extreme prejudice"
Tony Blair-"Whatever George said."
James Earl Jones-"Will do any film for $9999.95."
George Lucas-"Any message sent from this server can be freely used as a plot device in an upcoming special effects driven feature without any additional payment. Besides, it may make Episode III better." Bill Clinton-"I never said that." Bill Gates -"Cross us an we will crush you, unless it gets press, which nets you an X-Box for the crushing."

Extreme example

[entrager]

Here is a disclaimer for all e-mail that my company sends out:

NOTICE: This communication and any files transmitted with it ("communication") may contain privileged or other confidential information. This communication is intended solely for the individual or entity to whom it is addressed. If you are not the intended recipient, or believe that you have received this communication in error, please do not print, copy, retransmit, disseminate, or otherwise use this communication. Also, please indicate to the sender that you have received this communication in error, and then delete this communication and any copies. Thank you.

And for some reason our admins are complaining about the amount of space that our e-mail servers consume....

Re:If you have received this message in error...

[swb]

Now they just send the bill without any goods, and remarkably people pay them.

I've been trying to convince a friend that we need to start a business providing a legitimate (ie, you'd actually be able to use it) service that nobody needs or wants and just "sign people up" for it and send them bills. Those that paid the bill got their accounts left active, and those who didn't pay the first two bills we'd cancel until we tried them again.

The business we thought we'd set up was "internet service" -- buy a PRI and a dial access router, a 768K DSL line, throw up a couple of BSD boxes for email and web hosting in our garage and we'd have a real, plausable service in case someone complained.

The "service" overhead would be trivial, like maybe $2k a month, and the rest of our costs would be in direct mailing our bills to customers. I'm not sure where you as an individual can buy business mailing lists, but if we did the mailings ourselves, we could possibly only have $5-8K a month in gross overhead costs.

If you get only a 15% return rate for $24.95 per month on 120,000 bills sent, it's not hard to see a gross income of $500,000 per year.

I'm not even sure it's illegal, either.

cat .signature

[brassman]

The author of this email states that any "disclaimer" that appears below this sentence was added without his consent.

My disclaimer

[T3kno]

This is an email. It is the electronic equivalent of a POSTCARD. It has been split up into hundreds or thousands packets and blasted throughout the globe. Logged, scanned, filtered, parsed, grepped and heuristically analyzed by countless computers as well as humans. I wear a shirt that says "I read your email." If you for one moment think, believe, hold notion, or otherwise have the slightest inclination that anything you send via email is confidential you are an idiot. If you for one moment think, believe, hold notion, or otherwise have the slightest inclination that anything you send via email is only being read by the intended reciepients you are an idiot. If you have read this far you are an idiot.

Not at my work.

[FU_Fish]

Thankfully, we're not required to put such a disclaimer on e-mails at my work.

* This comment is own by FU_Fish and is intended only to be read by Slashdot users. If you do not have a slashdot account, you must forget that you ever read the above comment or face actions to swift and ruthless to name. *

** The above disclaimer is also owned by FU_Fish. By reading the above disclaimer you have agreed to its Terms Of Use, which does not allow reproduction in any way, including quoting, printing, or modding. **

Re:My disclaimer

[teroman]

Much simpler...

DISCLAIMER : You just read it, you can't unread it!

Re:Mail User License Agreement

[sapped]

This should be renamed to the Mail User Agreement License.

You hereby agree to the MAUL imposed with this message. If you do not agree to this MAULing and continue reading then we will send somebody around for a Better Educated Assessment Test (BEATing).

Re:Limit this crap to four lines...

[rixstep]

I consider a 100+ word message at the bottom of an email spam.

More correctly I think it's a 'dag-tag' [netlingo.com].

Re:addressing

[shotfeel]

I'm thinking if his email client is opening mail that doesn't have him as one of the recipients, he does have a better email client!

Re:Mail User License Agreement

[Anonymous Coward]

This should be renamed to the Mail User Agreement License. You hereby agree to the MAUL imposed with this message.

That'd be MUAL, not MAUL, and thus your joke falls on its face.

My reply

[heikkile]

To whom it may concern,

I have received numerous email messages with your company standard disclaimer on the bottom. I hereby notify you that to my best knowledge, I have not signed any non-disclosure agreements with you. Therefore I am free to publish, disseminate, discuss, and use the information in said mails as I damn well please.

As a reasonable person, I am willing to find a compromise. If you compensate for my time and trouble, I am willing to send you copies of said emails. Let's say $100 a piece, or $20000 for the whole pile. After that you can make me an offer for a non-disclosure agreement, and if I find the terms agreeable, I may even sign it.

As a courtesy, I will remain relatively quiet about those mails and about this correspondance, for the next seven days. After that, I make no promises.

Yours sincerely

J.Random Luser

Re:Limit this crap to four lines...

[Anonymous Coward]

Email is basically a post card.

Nonsense. I look on the back of every e-mail I receive, and I have never once seen a tacky picture of a popular tourist destination.

Re:My disclaimer

[scaryjohn]

If that were shorter, I'd have a new .signature file.