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Legal Email Signatures - Fight back
Generally speaking, the wheels tend to fall off the wagon when lawyers get involved. Take email signatures for example. In the old days it use to be a way to signal the end of your email message, with a simple salutation. Maybe a Yours faithfully or maybe even your name.
However the humble email signature has evolved into something more elaborate and much more annoying. In many instances, the signature can be many times larger than the email it is representing. When you find yourself in that situation, then please sit back and have a think about what your doing.
Let's excuse the people, for the moment, that think it cool to place images at the bottom, failing miserably to understand that many devices/clients can still not render HTML email (Blackberry for example). For they do not know what they do.
Let us instead look at the clowns that insist on placing a number of paragraphs of legalize nonsense at the bottom of every outgoing email, locking you into a whole manner of restrictions and conditions. If that isn't bad enough, god help you if you get into a conversation thread with them. They appear to have lost the ability to edit, so before you know it, you can have many copies of this legal contract flying around within the emails, clogging up mailboxes and bandwidth.
These people must be saved from themselves primarily and then from us. For the good of the rest of us, we have to fight back.
I came across another person's frustration with this increasing trend and I thought he put it rather beautifully. So, I hope he doesn't mind, I have reproduced it here.
- legal notice or threat(s)
- disclosure restriction(s)
- forward restriction(s)
- "intended recipient" nonsense
More power to him.
With more of us picking up email on the move, most carriers charge us on the bandwidth we consume. It doesn't take too long before you can actually starting putting a real cost to these unnecessary and pompous email signatures.
Time has come to let the sender foot the bill - you want to email me a stupid big email legal signature, then be prepared for an invoice to be raised to your company for the bandwidth/time used.
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Comments (2)
I do wonder who on earth imposes these signatures upon the person that has to send it out. Is it a company policy, automatically appended when it reaches the smtp server? Why can't they just provide a link in the signature to a page that has all the crap they stick in the signature on it instead??!
The thing that gets me is that if you received a fax or letter with all that legalise at the botom you'd think "whoa what am I letting myself in for here" but the flip side is that I've seen many people send emails as if they have no gravitas at all; if they were writing a letter or fax they would pay far more attention to what they are committing to, even though it has no dislaimer, so I can understand to a point why comapnies are paranoid.