At 11:24 AM 1/24/02 -0800, Matt Schalit wrote: [...] >That's was interesting Gareth. Thanks for posting >that. But what's all this crap below it?
I'll assume this is a real question, Matthew, not just a thin excuse for being vulgar on a list that normally has a more polite tone. (Its vulgarity is why I'm not quoting your message in full.) The sort of boilerplate you refer to is, sadly, becoming more and more common. It is the consequence, I think, of lawyers telling their clients what they "have to do" to protect themselves from lawsuits. I put "have to do" in quotes because ***I'm not a lawyer***, so I don't know if the boilerplate is either needed or useful in any real legal context. I wonder if the lawyers themselves know, or if they are simply telling clients to do this sort of thing "just in case", not considering how stupid it makes the resulting e-mail look. On mailing-list messages, it makes the poster look particularly silly. Since the messages are being sent to mailing lists, and the fact that mailing-list traffic is commonly archived is well known, I doubt (though I do not *know*) the boilerplate has any legal force in context (and I *hope*, but also do not *know*, that such frivolous uses of it will some day cause a court to invalidate the boilerplate as a source of protection). Aside from the silliness of the content, it is rude in that it constitutes an excessively-long .sig block and is posted ONLY in html form (another flaw that I *hope* -- ask a lawyer to know, not me -- constitutes a legal flaw, since many people use MUAs that display HTML as a difficult-to-read mess). But these are old complaints about rude people, not specific to this piece of nonsense ... which, to be fair to Gareth, is most likely added automatically by the Lotus Mail Server that Gareth's mail seems to go through. In practice, unless we filter on it (something I'd favor doing **only** if it does have the legal effect of prohibiting archiving, and that I just don't know), we will endure a lot more of it. Gresham's Law applies to good taste as well as money ... but I guess you knew that, right? -- ------------------------------------"Never tell me the odds!"--- Ray Olszewski -- Han Solo Palo Alto, CA [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---------------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ Leaf-user mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/leaf-user
