Extraneous "legal" babble--and my reaction to it.

Y'all can stop thumping on me about it "because it is required by the employer".

After contemplating my navel for a while, it dawned on me that my sensitivity is due to an old wound.

Years ago, Faculty, Staff, Students, and myriad others more or less loosely connected with my employer complained that they could never make contact with me.

As a defensive measure (among others) I crafted a .sig that contained all of the telephone numbers and email addresses by which I could be reached (included a pager number) 7 x 24 x 52 with (guaranteed) no more than 20 minute delay.

It ran to 7 lines, including the dash dash space EOL protocol sentinel.

I was banned from NANOG because of the excessive length. (And yes, I got banned for other things at other times as well, mostly having to to do with trying to protect the network I administered from abuse.)

There's quite a difference between the 'legal babble' and 'contact
info' at the end of a message.
Regardless, my comment was meant for fun, not to upset you.

-A

What part of "required by employer" is different?

I'm not seeing it.

I, for one, feel your pain in this matter. When I was a consultant in The Bad Ol' Days, I had so many telephone numbers where I *could* be that my .sig would be a run-on one as well. As a compromise, I had my cell number and a hyperlink to a Web site page with the full monte.

That was before I joined NANOG, so I never tested the tolerance of the people here with that solution.

When I was employed as a full-timer (including now) my "work" mail has the same sort of crap. One option you might want to consider is to use a personal e-mail account for places like NANOG with the single-line disclaimer "Views expressed herein may not be my employer's view"

Maybe people could adopt an unofficial-official end-of-signature flag. Then you could have procmail strip everything after the flag:

Maybe people could adopt an unofficial-official end-of-signature flag.
Then you could have procmail strip everything after the flag:
     --
     This is my signature
     My phone number goes here
     I like dogs
     -- end of signature --
     Everything below here and to the right of here was inserted by my
mailserver, which is run by lawyers who don't understand you can't
enforce contracts through emails to public mailing lists. Please delete
if you're not the intended recipient.

Of course, when you route around something like this it usually comes
back 10 fold, but maybe if it became worthless they might do things the
right way and put stuff like this in email headers.

X-Optional-Flags: Delete-if-not-intended-recipient,
might-contain-secret-company-information-we-didn't-bother-to-encrypt

Then let the email clients try to work out what that means.

Please see Signature block - Wikipedia

I thought that was in rfc 2822, but I can not find it.