I personally agree with the invalidity of disclaimers to a certain extent.
However the company determines the corporate standards and I have to abide
by those. They demand disclaimers on all outbound emails.
There is a different mentality in North America and Europe on the validity
of disclaimers, more so about legality rather than the true intention of
them.
However, there are major players that support it, ie: GFI's MailEssentials,
Barracuda's Spam Firewall's, etc..
The reason behind it is so that if you by mistake email a document to an
invalid recipient, at least you have mentioned that if you are not the
intended recipient to delete it, and not to forward it on. This does have
validity since incorrect email addresses are common, and it does stand up to
some degree in court, at least in North America, as our own privacy
commissioner has already checked into this. For example, if someone gets a
confidential email that has no disclaimer, he has the right to say he wasn't
warned that he could not share that info elsewhere. With the disclaimer (and
the company keeping a record of outbound emails), there is some protection
to at least protect the company stating that they did at least put a notice
on the message.
Anyways, I've used many appliances/server mail software that do have a
global disclaimer setting, where you can indeed specify the font/size
location of it, etc...
My ignorance is with Exim only, I'm new to it.
I now see that it cannot be done with Exim very easily, so we will just have
users append it manually to all their signatures instead (quite the hassle).
Thanks for the responses.
From: Philip Hazel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Reply-To: [email protected]
To: ".|MoNK|Cucumber ." <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
CC: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [exim] Easy Disclaimers with Exim?
Date: Thu, 7 Jul 2005 13:58:24 +0100 (BST)
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On Thu, 7 Jul 2005, .|MoNK|Cucumber . wrote:
> According to Exim's site, it is difficult and not recommended to use
> disclaimers.
It is difficult and not recommended to automatically add disclaimers in
an MTA. There are other ways of "using" disclaimers, if you really must.
> However, most companies still require it, as it at least serves as some
form
> of disclaimer in case of error.
It's usually the disclaimer that's in error. :-)
Do "most companies" require disclaimers at the bottom of paper letters
that they send out? I don't recall seeing such. Why are they so keen for
email?
> Does anyone know of a really easy way to append a disclaimer at the
bottom of
> all outgoing emails?
There is no easy way, not in the MTA, anyway.
> This disclaimer would also need to be size 8 arial and appear about 4
lines
> after the bottom of the original message =)
The fact that you mention "size 8 arial" shows some ignorance of email
details, I'm afraid. Arial is a font, used mostly in the presentation of
Web and printed documents. There is no standard mechanism in email for
handling fonts. Indeed, a vast amount of email uses straightforward
ascii text - as does this message and indeed your posting - in which
there is no concept of fonts.
This subject has been discussed ad nauseam on this list and elsewhere. I
suspect there is enough material for a book. Here are some more points,
in no particular order:
1. If companies really, really cared about the validity of the content
of their emails, they would be interested in getting them signed,
because forgery is so easy. But then you definitely would not be able to
add a disclaimer later.
2. There is no unique definition of "the bottom" of an email. Read up
about the MIME structure of emails. A message may have many parts. An
MUA may display some of them and not others.
3. MTAs shouldn't be messing with emails any more than your mailroom
staff should be messing with your outgoing paper mail. If you want
disclaimers on messages, then you should insist that your staff
configure their MUAs to put them on before they send the messages. It is
not rocket science. Most MUAs can put on ".signature" files
automatically - see for example my .sig below.
4. Adding things to outgoing email could be considered tampering. Make
sure you tell all your staff that this is going to happen.
5. Expect to get grumbles from the recipients of one-line emails
followed by a 20-line disclaimer. If your disclaimer is particularly
silly, expect to see it quoted on mailing lists, newsgroups, etc.
especially if your users send postings to mailing lists.
6. And so on... for more, see
http://www.goldmark.org/jeff/stupid-disclaimers/
--
Philip Hazel University of Cambridge Computing Service,
[EMAIL PROTECTED] Cambridge, England. Phone: +44 1223 334714.
Get the Exim 4 book: http://www.uit.co.uk/exim-book
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