If I Screw Up, It’s Your Fault!
I can’t help but wonder how many bits have died to hold disclaimers like this one:
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. If you are not the intended recipient you are notified that any dissemination, distribution, use or copying of this communication is strictly prohibited. If you received this message in error, please immediately destroy this message.
I get these from various countries (I love the bilingual ones), with many variations on it. Spotlighting my email with “received in error” did a good job of getting many of them, and they’re all a waste of bits. I like this one because it’s vaguely threatening. Oooo, prohibited. By whom?
There’s nothing in law, custom, treaty, or ethics that says that if I accidentally send you mail that you meant for someone else that it’s anyone’s problem but mine. All the laws pertaining to postal mail are quite explicit that it now belongs to the recipient. While email is not postal mail, it’s hard to imagine it being any other way. There are enough precedents for the Internet that it’s pretty clear as well.
My office dreamed one of these up, and I stomped over to Counsel’s office and snarled just that. Yes, I was told, you’re right. We debated, with him taking the position that you have to protect intellectual property, and me taking the position that a disclaimer that you know isn’t supported by anything isn’t going to hold up in court, and will even be worse than nothing.
I didn’t change the company policy about stupid disclaimers, but I got a dispensation not to use it myself, and I suppose that’s better than nothing.
I’ve considered writing my own parody disclaimer, but haven’t come up with one I like. They’re all too whiny or bombastic to be funny. So let’s try coming up with a good parody disclaimer. Send them to me and I’ll do an article with some good ones.
Photo, “It’s Your Fault” courtesy of jarrod z.
I like this one: http://www.law.tm/disclaimers.html
Here’s one I can’t remember where I picked up:
Legal Disclaimer —
This email was intended only for those people that it was intended for. You may or may not be an intended recipient. If you are not the intended recipient, you may not read, delete, forward, store, respond to, or otherwise alter this email in any way. If you have received this email in error, please delete it, delete it from your deleted items, and then reply back to the sender stating that you were not the intended recipient.
Please note that if you do reply back to the sender, you show your intent that the original sender, who will now be the recipient, is indeed supposed to be the now intended recipient of your reply. If the original sender replies back to your message where you stated that you were not the intended recipient of the first message with the intent to thank you, you will then become the intended recipient of the second email, but you still won’t be the intended recipient of the first email, and all of your base are belong to us.
Notice: This e-mail and any attachments may or may not be confidential and may be intended solely for the attention and use of the named addressee(s) if I addressed it right. However, I’m not 100% sure who I intended to send this to or if it’s going to get there, email being what it is. If you are not the intended recipient, you should have known before you read it. You may only read the message above if you have my prior consent, even if you’ve never heard of me before today. If you have already violated this, then you owe me money for every word you have read (you should know how much). Security policy dictates that email from people at xxxxxxx.com does not represent what people at xxxxxxx.com think. If you have already received this message, please contact the sender and delete ALL files from your computer. This disclaimer is not necessarily legal or factually correct.
A slight parody entitled “The Investment Banker comes a-wooing”…
Melissa,
I love you.
Brad.
Note:
This information is confidential, intended only for the exclusive use of the authorized recipient and may contain information that is proprietary, constitutes a trade secret and/or is subject to copyright. If you are not the intended recipient any use and distribution of this information is strictly prohibited and you should notify me immediately by replying to this message if you’re rich and beautiful or permanently deleting it otherwise.
No representation is made with respect to the accuracy, completeness or timeliness of this information. Internet communications cannot be guaranteed to be secure or error-free as information could be intercepted, corrupted, lost, destroyed, arrive late or incomplete, or contain viruses. Therefore, I accept no responsibility for the information.
No representation is made that the sender is likely to achieve his objectives, that his career strategy will be successful, or that the recipient will or is likely to achieve any positive results, make any profit or will be able to avoid incurring losses from entering into a relationship with the sender. Past performance is no guarantee of future results.
This information is subject to change without notice.
You may snicker at the bottom of the page here:
http://attrition.org/security/rants/z/disclaimers.html
OK, so it’s not for email, but you get the idea…
Disclaimers are funniest when they are no use at all at doing the job they are intended for.
We should insert a stupid disclaimer above our comments. Or maybe below them.
🙂
When I tried to institute this practice at our company, I was told, “The people we email will make fun of us for having this at the bottom of our messages”–so I feel for the attorney at mordaxus’ company.
Some of us in the legal world probably harbor a secret hope that–like advertising campaigns you hate but that influence you nonetheless–the force of sheer repetition will induce those who think they’ve become inured to the seemingly meaningless notices to internalize them, so that senders will have a heightened awareness of confidentiality when transmitting messages and, just maybe, recipients will delete misdirected messages.
Fact is, whether or not the warnings are worth the weight of wasted bits, they do have legal value and enforceability–in at least a few circumstances.
It’s an admittedly clunky approach, and I doubt anyone would tolerate being forced to include notices if they had to be manually inserted in each message. My preference (for corporate email) is: slap it on by default & give the sender the discretion to remove it.
I recently come across a version where unlike many others emails claiming that “No virus found in this outgoing message”, this one honestly stated that “The sender does not guarantee that this message, including any attachment, is secure or virus free” 🙂
Dear Mordaux: How about this for a disclaimer: If you are not the intended recipient for this email, you will be struck blind.
Confidentiality Note: The information contained in this message, and any attachments, are transmitted in plain text for everyone to see while going across untrusted networks and stored on mail servers and often archived for future reference under the pretense of national security. Although this message is intended solely for the person or entity to which it is addressed, there has been absolutely no attempt made to actually enforce this despite the long standing availability of PGP and other encryption schemes. If you received this in error, please forward this message to everyone you know (except the sender) and laugh hysterically at the misguided notion that unencrypted e-mail is private.
I’ve been using this one intermittently for some time making fun of people who use these things. I was also considering a version that leaned more corporate and suggested that you e-mail the note back to my boss to ensure that I got fired for my incompetence, thus ridding the workplace of carelessness and mediocrity.