> At the end of the day a expect nobody much reads the thing anyway, > it's just a get out if somebody tries to sue you for something > later.
We've had some recent experience with SEC/NASD regulations and messaging disclaimers due to the US mutual fund scandal. A few of our clients have been probed--they are not under actual investigation, I should mention :)--and, while they'd followed retention policies, they had not included a disclaimer on their outgoing mail, and were immediately instructed to do so by outside counsel. What's insane about the instructions is that rather than the "Content herein does not represent corporate opinion..." blather (which I believe may be defensible in some cases of personal e-mail that subverts official policy), the recommended disclaimer attempts to frame e-mails to investors that include verifiably true, database-driven, pricing information and are sent from a dedicated mail account as random, unverifiable communications. That is, the body of the e-mail states that a certain instrument has value x and shows trend y using analysis z, information upon which an investor would make a purchasing decision...but the disclaimer says that the neither x, y, or z is true--not simply that the analysis is an opinion, but that *all* information is to be considered untrue. How this all relates to us as mail admins is that the admittedly unreliable nature of SMTP is being leveraged to the point that all e-mail communications are deemed not only forge*able*, but in fact forged. This flies in the face of the mission-critical achievements of e-mail, and it's a sort of moral sleight of hand that...well, I don't have a hold on the whole story, but it just makes me uneasy to have technology scapegoated for human immorality, that's all. IT has its own ethical and moral issues to deal with without other stuff being bundled in. > When the country stops being run by lawyers perhaps we can return to > a more honorable way of doing things. Well, while there certainly are situations in which I agree with you, I don't see how you could frame the mutual fund scandal one in which there is any essential "honor" compromised by the presence of lawyers. It's illogical to assume that lawyers are responsible for the disgusting flouting of regulations, even if their later participation for the defense is troubling. I *am* offended at the IT-illiteracy of "expert" lawyers who make 10x the salary of IT staff to give the staff garbled, if not impossible, instructions, and spend other people's money covering up ostensibly nonexistent activity. :) A few off-topic �. Sorry for the clutter. -Sandy ------------------------------------ Sanford Whiteman, Chief Technologist Broadleaf Systems, a division of Cypress Integrated Systems, Inc. e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ------------------------------------ To Unsubscribe: http://www.ipswitch.com/support/mailing-lists.html List Archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/imail_forum%40list.ipswitch.com/ Knowledge Base/FAQ: http://www.ipswitch.com/support/IMail/
