Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/

[Eric Wolfram <ewolfram AT infinex.com>]

At 01:50 PM 1/13/03 -0500, you wrote:
>I do a lot of "business email" these days with companies all over the  
>world, and have noticed the growing popularity of legal disclaimers on  
>email, such as the one below. Does anyone have an idea why the heck  
>companies feel its necessary to include *pages* worth of legal drivel  
>with each email? (Note that I changed the name of the company to  

20K worth of legal text at the bottom of every message is a good way for a
company to provide legal protection against the idiots they are employing.
I imagine these legal statements hold absolutely NO legal weight --
especially when the user is sending the email to a public list and, in that
case, the message is mostly just annoying. More importantly, it brands
everyone at the company as a total morons, who apparently cannot be trusted
to address or write an email message correctly. 

If the company really wanted to protect confidential information, the
company should investigate the use of public key signing and encryption.
PGP is, of course, a well-respected application in this field and it's
their fault for not using it -- not mine. A confidential messages would be
encrypted to the recipient(s) public key(s) and if the message was
inadvertently addressed to the wrong address, no confidential information
would have been leaked (aside from perhaps the email addresses of other
recipients and the subject line itself). 

When employees gets in the habit of signing messages -- and this is sweet
-- then viruses they transmit by clicking on the ILuvU.exe virus will
arrive as UNSIGNED messages, and therefore will be automatically suspect by
anyone in regular correspondence with the n00bie employee. 

Eric Wolfram
http://wolfram.org/