Disclaimer Attachment- ONLY ONCE

[Steve Evans]

On the legality of e-mail disclaimers - http://slate.msn.com/id/2101561/


Steve Evans
SDSU Foundation

-----Original Message-----
From: MailScanner mailing list [mailto:MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK] On
Behalf Of Matt Kettler
Sent: Monday, October 25, 2004 5:32 PM
To: MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
Subject: Re: Disclaimer Attachment- ONLY ONCE

At 07:33 PM 10/25/2004, Venkata Achanta wrote:
>Sorry may be i have to change the subject line to attract ppl to read 
>my message. I apologize if this is an incovenience for some of you.

no inconvenience, but I don't see how this would be possible with
MailScanner.

MailScanner's "sign clean messages" feature is intended to have an
notice that a message was virus scanned, not a legal disclaimer.
Although many
(use|abuse) it for this purpose.

In the context of it's real purpose, it makes no sense for MS to "only
add it once", as the virus scan would have to apply to each message
separately, so should the signature stating there was a scan.

To change it, Julian would have to add a bit of code to look for the
signature (possibly with added line-wraps and >'s added) before
inserting it.

Quite frankly, I hope Julian doesn't add a "only once" feature, in the
interest of encouraging people to not use MS for the purpose of adding
legalese spam to all of their email.

(Just as I wish he'd remove the bounce mis-feature, but he's at least
decided to put a few hoops in before you can enable this dangerous
feature, and I'm thankful for that much.)


> >if someone sends out a e-mail and get a repsonse and if he responds 
> >again the disclaimer is getting attached again.if this happens X 
> >number of times we end up having disclaimer attached X number of time

> >as well which looks ugly(better than spam though :-)) )

Quite frankly, I feel that bulk-disclaimer-attachers are *worse* than
spammers.

They aren't even selling anything, they're just inserting garbage in
email to cover their hind ends in the event of a  misdirected email by a
careless employees. And quite frankly, I seriously question if the 'this
message may be legally privileged' disclaimers even offer much, if any,
useful legal protection. So not only are they selling nothing, they are
also saying nothing of value, just wasting space on the world's disk
drives to keep some high-level manager happy. Wonderful.

For that matter, re-posters who cannot even wait 6 hours before
reposting the same message with a different subject might be better
suited by exercising a little patience.

------------------------ MailScanner list ------------------------ To
unsubscribe, email jiscmail at jiscmail.ac.uk with the words:
'leave mailscanner' in the body of the email.
Before posting, read the MAQ (http://www.mailscanner.biz/maq/) and the
archives (http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/mailscanner.html).

------------------------ MailScanner list ------------------------
To unsubscribe, email jiscmail at jiscmail.ac.uk with the words:
'leave mailscanner' in the body of the email.
Before posting, read the MAQ (http://www.mailscanner.biz/maq/) and
the archives (http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/mailscanner.html).