[replying to somebody who thought it was just fine to have on your public
 emails (going to mailing lists) a long signature attached by your company,
 saying that this email is confidential, threatening legal action if you
 redistribute it, etc., etc.,]

What if your email system at work added a 100k advertisement for your
company, or worse, a juicy collection of 4-letter words to each of your
emails? Would you still use that system to send out emails to your friends
or to mailing lists? No. You'll either tell your employers to change their
offensive system, or if you can't you'll get a different email account, from
a yahoo.com, from and ISP, or whatever, and use that to mail to people outside
your company.

Similarly, the legal signature (which I doubt, by the way, is attached
automatically - in most companies I know they require it, but it's not
centrally enforced) is offensive in mailing lists.

It is offensive for the same reason spam is: spammers try to shift their
advertising costs onto you, and legal-sigature-putters try to shift their
legal burdens onto you. Instead of making sure *they* don't accidentally
send confidential information to the wrong people, they stick a huge
warning/threat on each and every one of their emails, so every one of their
readers will need to verify that they are not reading the wrong email, list
owners need to verify that the wrong email wasn't sent to the list, archive
owners must verify that the wrong email didn't end up in an archive, and
so on.

Most people, lists, and archives will do this for you out of the kindness
of their own heart (go and remove a serious accident from the archive,
I mean), so adding a legal threat is not only useless and counterproductive,
it's plainly offensive.

In my opinion, at least.

And don't tell me that signature has no legal effect. It might not, I don't
know, but then again, if it doesn't have any effect, why do people and/or
system administrators insist to keep it, even when told it is offensive to
some people?


-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |         Sunday, Sep 1 2002, 25 Elul 5762


I wonder what would happen if a person forced to add such a signature
will prepend to it his own signature, looking something like this:


 +----- Please ignore the following CRAP:
 |
 V

-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |         Sunday, Sep 1 2002, 25 Elul 5762

***************************************************************************
            *** This email is classified top-secret ***
If you find this email, give it immediately to the nearest police station.
Unauthorized copying of this email will result in the death penalty.
Please reply to this email without reading it first - you are not authorized
to read it. You are also not authorized to quote parts of the email when
replying: not only is this email top-secret, it is also copyrighted by me
and I hired the RIAA and MPAA bulldogs to guard the copyright for me.
"Cherem De'Rabinu Gershom" [1] upon anyone who reads this email without my
approval.
***************************************************************************

[1] If I remember correctly, it was Rebinu Gershom around the year 1000
who declared it forbidden to read other people's mail without permission.
There's no need to say that on every email as that is the implied norm,
in both written mail and email, as well as any other sort of private message
(carrier pigeon, telegraph, etc.). Just as you don't need to put up a large
sign on your house saying "thou shalt not steal" - it is not legal to steal
from a house even if it doesn't carry such a sign. Moreover, even if your
house does carry such a sign (or your email carries that paragraph) it
doesn't prevent criminals or enemies from doing just the opposite, if given
the opportunity.
On the other hand, if you post your message on a public forum, be it an
email mailing list, a pashkevil in me'a-she'arim, yelling it in Hyde Park,
or a (rather silly) display of semaphores in public, you cannot expect
your message to be kept private - even if you add to it "Please don't
tell anybody what I've just told you".


(Note: parts of this email have been recycled from my 2001 posts. Sorry
about that. But recycling helps save our planet! :) )

-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |         Monday, Sep 2 2002, 25 Elul 5762