Maybe people could adopt an unofficial-official
end-of-signature flag. Then you could have
procmail strip everything after the flag:
Everyone:
Honestly.. the best method is to not let it bug you anymore. It's only a seething issue to you because you let it be.
You're suggesting that one use 15 blank lines just so that you don't have to see any of these self-inflicted transgressions. It would be much simpler and less taxing on all involved to simply not let it bother you anymore.
"Impossible!" you may cry.. but I don't believe so. I used to be the same. It's easily beatable. You could send twenty paragraphs of so-called 'legal text' suffixed to your email and I wouldn't so much as bat an eye. It may take some personal effort but you need to learn to 'let it go'.
This is a non-issue in the scope of things and you've made a mountain out of this grain of sand. Brush it aside and move on. It isn't worth your time.
Curiously enough, the same thing was said about spam 30-ish years ago.
The "ignore it and maybe it will go away" approach did not yield
satisfactory results.
These "disclaimers" are stupid and abusive. They have no place in
*any* email traffic, and most certainly not in a professional forum.
And it is unreasonable to expect the recipients of the demands and
threats they embody to silently tolerate them ad infinitum.
---rsk
Exactly so.
JHD
I am trying to understand why the legal babble bothers anyone. Does it give you a nervous twitch? Remind you why you hate legal? It's just text at the bottom of your email.
Regards,
Dovid
Disclaimers like those are like brown M&M's backstage at a Van Halen concert.
If you see one of those on mail sent to a public mailing list, it's a sure
sign that there's other, much more serious issues. Because let's face it,
they're an admission that the offending company hasn't gotten a *real*
data confidentiality program in place, and the amount of attempted adhesion
in them indicates that the legal people asking for it may not be all
that competent either....
It's just text at the bottom of your email.
1 often a very large amount of text - in this case the legalese was something like 10x longer than the comment!
2 its pointless. Its not enforceable and doesn't mean anything.
Shall i put a chapter of war and peace at the end of my emails? You could just ignore it..... 
alan
In article <1515735780-1441805800-cardhu_decombobulator_blackberry.rim.net-1712088326-@b13.c3.bise6.blackberry> you write:
I am trying to understand why the legal babble bothers anyone. Does it give you a nervous twitch? Remind you why you hate legal?
It's just text at the bottom of your email.
Indeed, but it's text that says something between "I am stupid" and
"my life is controlled by people who are stupid."
Generally speaking, many of us would prefer less stupid.
Regards,
John Levine, johnl@iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. http://jl.ly
I would. Once I see legal stuff I know to stop reading. It does not hurt anyone. Not sure why this hurts so much. Some things will remain a mystery.
Regards,
Dovid
Dovid Bender wrote:
I would. Once I see legal stuff I know to stop reading. It does not hurt
anyone. Not sure why this hurts so much. Some things will remain a
mystery.
No mystery ... It wastes bits that could otherwise be used to watch cat videos.
Tony
I love cat videos.
It's all about best practices.
In an e-mail thread, where the thread grows with each response, the original e-mail etiquette is that people put their reply at the bottom of the message. The theory behind the practice is that when you are going back to read the message later, you can read it top-down and get the contributions in chronological order. (And only save the last one, instead of all of them.)
If you have a huge disclaimer in your sig, when the reader goes to the bottom of the e-mail to read the latest contribution, they have to back up over the over-large signature block. This is irritating. For some readers using non-graphical e-mail clients or Web clients, that irritation can grow to the point that the message gets tossed.
That's why the Best Practices RFC said to have no more than three lines in your .sig of at most 71 characters each.
With AOL and "Forever September", some of these things get lost in the waves and waves of non-compliance, not because people don't want to be good citizens, but because they don't know better. And, if you aren't keeping the entire thread (such as what I'm doing here), you trim quotes to the absolute minimum to maintain context, so that people don't have to wade through the whole mess.
It also avoids top-posting, which in some circles is Bad Form(tm).
By the way, it's never been about cat videos...
In my case, I resent the idea that some lawyer somewhere thought I could somehow be bound to an agreement I never agreed to which does not appear to me until I have reached the end of an email on which he/she feels I should be bound.
It’s an absurd construct. It’s a waste of bits that could be used for good purpose such as discussing why we all dislike lawyers so much. It’s a display of arrogance and it’s presumptuous.
In short, it’s an offensive behavior.
The fact that it is a corporate policy only makes it more offensive.
Owen
Here's the thing...
If your employer insists on attaching a legalistic signature to your
email which warns the recipient that the message is for their eyes
only... it's because you are not authorized to make public statements
as an employee of the company.
So please respect that limitation and make your _public_ posts to
NANOG without using your work email address.
'Cause if you don't respect us enough not to flood us with wacky legal
documents and you don't respect your employer enough to obey their
rules, why should we respect anything else you have to say?
Make sense?
Regards,
Bill Herrin
I've seen it in multiple languages (not necessarily on this list).
Furthermore, some mailing lists support HTML and when they send it in
HTML it sends two copies.
Some others even add a corporate image (sometimes mistakenly huge,
sometimes small) to their signature.
People do this a lot. If everybody did the same for all messages it
would be a huge waste of bandwidth.
For servers, because it's 1 byte times N subscriptions.
For readers, because people should be able to read this in their mobile
devices. For some this means access charges by byte.
That's why it's frowned upon in mosts mailing lists and just directly
forbidden in others. This is not new at all.
Just my two cents.
Best regards.
I am trying to understand why the legal babble bothers anyone. Does it give you a nervous twitch? Remind you why you hate legal? It's just text at the bottom of your email.
I can see both sides of this:
1. People who post to this list from a work email address often have no control over what their employer appends to the end of their outgoing emails. The footers in question are usually added after the fact because someone in a position of authority at $employer says it needs to be there.
2. A half-page of legalese boilerplate following a one-line message on a mailing list that goes out to many thousands of people can be a bit irritating.
The compromise would seem to be to use a third-party email account for subscribing to mailing lists, but there could be environments where that doesn't fly with those same people in positions of authority...
jms
If your employer insists on attaching a legalistic signature to your
email which warns the recipient that the message is for their eyes
only... it's because you are not authorized to make public statements
as an employee of the company.
No, that's not it. A disclaimer "I don't speak for foocorp" is not at
all the same as "you have to keep this super sekrit foocorp message
confidential."
The disclaimers tend to be much shorter and are somewhat reasonable,
stating that this message does *not* constitute a contract. As
explained at length, the confidentiality stuff purports to be a
contract but is not. As I said it can be summarized as "I am stupid"
or "I am controlled by stupid."
Regards,
John Levine, johnl@iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. http://jl.ly
I am trying to understand why the legal babble bothers anyone. Does
it give you a nervous twitch?
Your disrespectful query is not really worthy of a answer because it is obviously not asked in good faith, but I am going to try to answer it it because there may be others who actually are interested in my answers.
Remind you why you hate legal?
That sentence does not make any sense to me. I don't hate much, certainly not "legal", what ever that might turn out to mean,
It's
just text at the bottom of your email.
That has been the answer of rogues and renegades to network messaging abuse since before there was an Internet.
Now to try and answer "why does it bother me?" (There are already clues in what I have said above, but I am guessing that th4 OP is not into "clues" much.)
I am old school and I still try, in an increasingly hostile world, to deal with electronic messages in the order of real time, with the oldest material at the top and the newest at the bottom.
I am old school and still believe in not causing read-before-writes, not violating blocking-factor protocols, and not forcing people to pay for the transmission of bits they don't want, don't need, and did not ask for--especially if the bits are hostile and are carrying spam, viruses, trojans, or legal traps into which the receiver might innocently blunder.
In the instant case it is this latter aspect that concerns me most as recipient--I did not ask for the message carrying it, I have no idea what about the message puts me at risk, and on and on through a number of arguments that others have covered well.
I am old, unemployed, unemployable, in less than robust health, and I don't think I could survive being dragged into court because of something I did (or did not do) and I could not survive the expense of my defense and of the almost-certain adverse judgement the courts seem bound to hand down these days.
And in the instant case (not always the case) the 11 1/2 word query struck me as ingenuous that would have been more appropriate in a high-school class*; and I looked elsewhere in the message to see if I could work out why somebody would ask that kind of a question in this kind of forum.
*I am still undecided on that question.
So far what I have learned
1) It causes issues reading bottom up (which I never do, I always go top down to review the convo) but I can how it bothers others.
2) You don't want lawyers saying "we had a warning, you violated it now we sue". Understandable.
Thanks for the explanation.
Regards,
Dovid
I can not believe (except as, perhaps, an irrefutable sign of my advancing years) that I did not mention the very personal objection to the apparently content-free Wile E. Coyote legalese pollution:
The irrefutable fact that in years (and administrations) past I was banned from NANOG for offenses that to me today seem more defensible and a great deal less egregious than in the instant case.