In almost every single netiquette guide, people are reminded that a brief signature line is appropriate at the end of an email or newsgroup message. This rule is often abused by spammers, newbies and trolls, but on the whole, it has worked fairly well.
Until recently...
Now, it seems that anyone using their email account at work is unwittingly spamming the rest of the world, useulessly wasting precious bandwidth and valuable electrons. Every email coming out of corporate America or Corporate Australia has to have 20 lines of legalese disclaimers and other useless crap. What's the deal with that?
I analysed a recent post to a mailing list I follow, to make a point. The content was broken down like this:
- Email transport headers: 30 lines, 1656 characters
- Message body: 28 lines, 1367 characters
- Corporate disclaimers: 111 lines, 4205 characters
- Virus checking statements: 12 lines, 339 characters
- MIME regurgitated: 28 lines, 1513 characters
The message body was a predictably bad joke. I can wear the transport overhead, even though certain email clients (such as those designed in Redmond) put all sorts of extra crap in the real RFC headers. The corporate disclaimers were a waste of time; nobody reads them. They only annoy people and get in the way of the actual message. But in this litigious day and age, where everyone wants to sue everybody else, nobody can take responsability for their own actions, and everyone is trying to cover their arses, just so that if they get sued they can point to their disclaimer and say "bad luck - not my fault".
Anyway, I really wonder if half the legalese verbiage would really stand up in court if put to the test; I suspect much of it is simply hot air, to keep the lawyers happy.
And then of course, there is the "certified virus-free" crap. As far as I'm concerned, this is a blatant advertisement for somebody's virus-scanning product. Sure, they can scan it for known viruses to get that warm fuzzy feeling, but there is always a window of time between when a virus comes into the wild, and when the providers come out with their database update. So there will always be the potential for a virus to slip through and infect some poor sod's skanky MS Outlook system, which will happily go ahead and spam everyone they know into infected bliss.
Attachments are always going to be a potential source of viruses. But if people insist on using products that are more concerned with bells and whistles to keep you on the upgrade treadmill than they are about a secure architecture, people will always suffer. There are two simple solutions: first, use software that has been properly designed with security in mind, and second, train your users to deal with attachments sensibly.
I have a very simple policy that has protected me from viruses for many many years, and I am willing to share it with my gentle readers at no additional charge:
- Don't run executables from anywhere. Period. No matter how funny the animation is supposed to be. No really, don't. If you want to watch animations, view them with Flash or something. Executables only work on the platform and system they were compiled for anyway, immediately limiting their usefulness and lifetime. Why should I trust an entire executable and give it complete privileges to my machine, when all I need to get at is some data?
- Don't enable macros in documents you open from external sources. Honestly, how often are macros really necessary to view some sodding text?
- Secret weapon: use a Free Operating System with a decent email system.
It's a pointless waste. Disclaimers - why are they there? Real recipients just ignore them because they are annoying and get in the way of the real message, and unintended recipients ignore it and just hit the Delete key anyway. So in order to keep the lawyers happy, we are wasting some 50% of our bandwidth?
Pass the clue-stick...
e-Mail disclaimers
Hi
Well I only happened across your site , I must confess, because it is listed as using Drupal, and obviously I wanted to view others implementations.
However this article caught my eye, and you know, it is so damned nice to hear someone speaking good old common sense. I loathe this litigous mindset of people today. Thanks almost entirely to the Greed of lawyers.
However as someone who runs an international site for health professionals I am almost forced to use this leglese, because I know their are people out there who will jump at the chance to make a quick buck, off my non-profit organisations back.
But that said you raise a very valid point, an certainly got me thinking. So from now on I will drop the legalese text, and instead provide a url link to our legalese section on the website.
So there, you have made one organisation rethink and reimplement its' litigation defense strategy. Maybe this would work others too, so instead of hundreds of wasted characters and dozens of lines of bulls**t legalese, one or two lines + url = 40 charcaters.
i.e - Disclaimer
http://www.icorp.org/legal/disclaimer.htm
THANK YOU
Paul Sauter
Chief Web Officer
ICORP Network
No - thank *you* !
Thanks should really go to you, Paul. Wow... I didn't think people actually read my little rants...;-)
It is heartening to read that you're actually going to make this change. I think it is necessary to start redressing the imbalance, and yours is a big step in the right direction.
Hopefully more people will think about just how much bandwidth they are wasting (I think the above is only touching on a much larger problem actually).
::gavin
Of course...
Of course people read your rants. This is the internet. No one has anything better to do. :)
Can't help but agree with all of it. Also can't help but feel you could simply have said:
Legal disclaimers waste bandwidth and probably wouldn't stand up in court. Virus scanners are never bulletproof, and it's just free advertising when "scanned for viruses" disclaimers get thrown into the mix too. Argh. What's the point? Argh. Etc.
But then, it wouldn't be a proper rant, would it now? ;)
Redmond bashing
I can wear the transport overhead, even though certain email clients (such as those designed in Redmond) put all sorts of extra crap in the real RFC headers. The corporate disclaimers were a waste of time; nobody reads them. They only annoy people and get in the way of the actual message.
Well, personally, I've used linux (Red Hat 7.2 and now have a dual-boot setup with Windows XP and Mandrake 9.1 RC1) and well, found things to be okay, but the user interface was nowhere near Windows XP or Mac OS X's quality (not that I'd expect it to be). I've never used that particular mail client before, but I have used M$ Outlook XP and am currently beta testing Outlook 11.
Ignoring for the momment that M$ software is somewhat buggy, their betas in particular, the sheer number of features (and their integration) that outlook and the rest of the M$ Office suite have is amazing. Sure some of the stuff is garbage and plenty of mistakes were made in 97 and 2000, and most likely, some was stolen from other clients, but there are some truely unique things in Office that no other suite has even come close to matching.
Okay, maybe most rely on proprietary M$ written code, but even the WebDAV system is being ported to Apache (which is of course the best web server, IIS doesn't even come close!) and .net will work with Linux apps, although maybe not /on/ linux :/
Sure, Microsoft uses all kinds of dirty tactics and are a monopoly. Bah, I hate em too and would rather use a Mac--However, I would STILL use M$ Office there too, since it's just THE BEST suite for word processing--period.
Getting back on topic, M$ Outlook 11 is much better than 97/2000, and builds further security features, like not loading web bugs from spam... and compared to many, many open source clients, it's much better. I can't say it's better than most email clients, but say, compared to Opera's M2 or Netscape/Mozilla's mail clients, it's much easier to use, feels more... personal.
Now I wont talk about M$ Internet Explorer, which I hate with a passion, but Windows Media Player 9, Microsoft Keyboards, they make lots of things I do like and use all the time. In fact I'd probably use just Macs and Linux boxes, with Graphics programs and TransGaming's WineX for playing Half-Life: Counter-Strike, and the only things I'd miss are programs like The Proxomitron which is easily the best and most user configurable (Windows-only) ad blocking and HTTP-content filtering software out there. It even catches Google's text ads with JD's config file for it, and you can run it as a service.
Well that rambled on more than I'd expected. But anyway, my final comment would be, don't bash outlook, since it's stupid people themselves that open attachments and don't install the latest patches or updates, so far, only IE6 SP1 has the decency to say "This file you are downloading may contain a virus ... blah blah". I've yet to see an open source project even care beyond "Let's make sure the reload button works". (okay that was stupid, just nm I'm tired)
In any case, I was here just to try out Drupal, and a paragraph comment as now ballooned into a huge anti-rant rant. umm. yeah.
-- Louis
Oh and what did that have to do with the citation above? Absolutely nothing. I just wanted to test it :p