HEAR HEAR!!!
Especially when said legalese tells the world + sundry that the email may contain "confidential" information and was sent to a publicly-archived mailing list! It seems to be the corporate fashion these days, as is HTML in email.
I noticed recently my email signature started to show a long legalese blurb, and it was the first thing to go. I participate on far too many publicly archived mailing lists as part of my day-to-day job to have this hindrance to communication.
I'm also the office Luddite with plain-text emails.
A few reasons why legal disclaimers should not be placed in email signatures:
- They are too long to fit in an email signature, which should be approximately 4 lines long, 6 at an ABSOLUTE maximum
- The content often presumes facts about the email and its intended audience which mostly wind up not being the case or places restrictions which are not appropriate for the intended audience
- They appear AFTER the email content, so it's only when you get to the footer do you realise "Oops, I shouldn't have been reading that!"
Due to the last two points, I would suspect they have next to no legal value. Pretty sure for a legal document to stand, the person has to see it and agree to it first before it becomes binding.
Moreover, email is inherently plain-text unless you've taken steps to ensure privacy (e.g. using industry-standard tools like S/MIME or OpenPGP). Unless you do this, I think it unreasonable to assume any kind of confidentiality over email.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
