Re: Email Disclaimers

[Simon Pedersen <spedersen75 () GMAIL COM>]

The best disclaimer ever:

***** IMPORTANT INFORMATION/DISCLAIMER *****
By sending an email to ANY of my addresses you are agreeing that:
   1. I am by definition, "the intended recipient"
   2. All information in the email is mine to do with as I see fit and
make such financial profit, political mileage, or good joke as it lends
itself to. In particular, I may quote it on usenet.
   3. I may take the contents as representing the views of your company.
   4. This overrides any disclaimer or statement of confidentiality that
may be included on your message.


On Mon, Mar 12, 2012 at 10:33 AM, Valdis Kletnieks
<Valdis.Kletnieks () vt edu>wrote:

> On Mon, 12 Mar 2012 09:51:03 EDT, Pete Hickey said:
> > Does anyone know if there has ever been a court case... in any
> > country in the world.... where the email disclaimer made a difference?
>
> I remember one case (cite is unfortunately eluding me) where the judge was
> of
> the opinion that blindly sticking the disclaimer about sensitive and
> confidential info on everything, including postings to public mailing
> lists,
> was uncomfortably close to overwarning.  Unfortunately, the judge's
> comment was
> basically an aside during trial, and the case was resolved on other
> grounds, so
> it didn't create any case law.
>
> I've seen a number of opinions that blindly sticking the exact same
> disclaimer
> on all mail could be *dangerous*, because it could be used to show that you
> stuck the disclaimer on there because you don't have any *real* control or
> tracking of the messages that *do* contain info covered by the disclaimer.
> After all, if you *knew* which messages had sensitive info, you could have
> just stuck the disclaimer on those, right?
>
> My personal favorite?  A disclaimer doesn't do any good unless it creates a
> contractual obligation.  Now if it *does* do so, how much of a liability
> have
> you just created for yourself by using the phrase "please delete all
> copies"?
> Hint - you *did* want that done in a forensically secure manner, so copies
> can't be dredged off the disk, right?  Including the big RAID filesystems
> on
> our main mail hubs, and the backup tapes, and the....  (What, you didn't
> think
> we were going to do that secure deletion for *free*, did you?)