MS exchange 2003

"You do know that email disclaimers have no legal weight whatsoever?"

Blanket statements like that are dangerous. Laws vary - from country to country, state to state, locality to locality. It may be true that such disclaimers have no legal weight in some or even many jurisdictions, but have you actually checked every possible jurisdiction, Sembee?

I haven't checked every possible jurisdiction - but I haven't seen anyone tell me otherwise.
Perhaps I should have said that the legal status of email disclaimers has yet to be proven. I am unaware of any location where the position is clear. Even if it was, you would still get issues where it is proven in one location, but another location could pass laws that nulify that clarification

As far as I am concerned you shouldn't say anything in email that you wouldn't write on the back of a postcard. That means if the message is delivered to me by accident I can do what I like with it - which could mean forward it with modifications - including removal of the disclaimer. How do you legislate against that.

If the message is secure or requires legal standing then it needs to be signed with a digital signature. That is the only thing that will really standup in court. Anything else cannot be trusted as it can be tampered with at any point and there is no way to prove that. While I am not a lawyer and don't claim to be one, that makes any kind of disclaimer or legal weight of an email message close to zero.

Most disclaimers are garbage anyway, poorly implemented or used as a marketing tool. They take up valuable bandwidth and can quickly annoy users.

What I tend to advise clients who want to use disclaimers is that they should get their lawyers to sign off the wording and advise on the use. I have seen all sorts of things advised - one client attaches a lengthy disclaimer to all emails - even internal ones. Sending "hello" back and forth twice produces an email that prints out over two pages - what a waste. I estimate that almost a third of their Exchange server db is taken up with the disclaimer.

And surely we have all seen the web sites that collect the ridiculous disclaimers that some companies put on their email messages.

Simon.

Oh, I agree, don't put anything in E-Mail you wouldn't put on a postcard - that's sound advice. What made my teeth itch was the blanket statement about the *legal* viability of disclaimers.

And yes, its just plain ridiculous what some people try to put in disclaimer footers.

Hi thanks for your replies

i have tried the gfi route and for the life of me can't get the disclaimer to appear. Alsi the microsoft route, it seems to say that it does not work with outlook. Is this correct. I have not tried this route yet

thanks

Note that the GIF route is doomed. Increasingly, SPAM filters are targetting image attachments as SPAM, and some mail systems now strip such attachments automatically, or change their extension (thus rendering dumber environments, like Outlook/Windoze, incapable of dealing with them as you intend, unless the extension is manually changed back - something 99.9% of recipients will never do). Also, not everyone is dumb enuf to use an HTML-enabled mailreader, so your GIF is completely lost on them (all you do is clutter their mailbox and annoy the system admin).

If you need to have a disclaimer, then you want to have one that is not dependent on the recipient using a specific technology to read their E-Mail. That eliminates any solution that depends on Outlook, or any other specific mailreader. You also want to employ a method that is not going to result in a significant increase in the probability that otherwise legitimate E-Mail will be tagged as SPAM - that means you should not use attachments. Similarly, you want to avoid the possibility of your disclaimer being stripped - again, no attachments.

What you want is a plain-text footer (or prepend). That can be read by ANY mailreader, won't be stripped, and is unlikely to increase to possibility that an E-Mail will be erroneously tagged as SPAM. Anything else is a waste of time.

yes i want a plain-text footer.
my exchange clients are using ms outlook

so what is the easiest weay of adding a disclaimer

sed

Well, if you only care about the disclaimer getting to your *internal* clients, and don't care if people outside your E-Mail system get it, then an Outlook-specific method might work for you. But if you want it to work for internal as well as external clients, then you need to text-only.

In a GroupWise environment, I would probably approach this by supplying all the users with a standard signature block that included the disclaimer, and configure the GroupWise client to automatically append the signature to all E-mail sent. I don't see any other way to do this internally, at the point of origin. I also have n idea if similar capabilities are available in the Outlook/Exchange environment - I avoid buggy, virus-ridden environments every chance I get.

There is a software called Exclaimer, you can download the free trial version from exclaimer.com. This software inserts three separate disclaimers, outbound (internal), outbound (external) and inbound. You can make it insert a single line or nothing at all for internal mails, while it inserts the standard mumbo-jumbo for external emails.

Try it.