Annual tirade #422

[dsrtao]

Email disclaimers. Do not use. Bad idea. Your company looks foolish, not professional.

If you are an exception, you are a lawyer.

If you send one to a mailing list, it looks particularly stupid to have a "you must immediately destroy this information and report it to me" disclaimer.

If you are in sales, having "The statements and opinions expressed in this e-mail do not necessarily represent those of $COMPANY" at the bottom of your message looks really foolish. Yes, I mean you.

If your company is doing this, find out why. Persuade the person who made this decision to work for a competitor. Your company will prosper.

Comments

[cellio]

We're required to use that sort of thing. Ours is a little less odious than many, but it's still stupid. I have no hope of persuading, or even identifying, the people who could change that decision; it's a big company that does a lot of government work.

I don't post to mailing lists from work, so I never have to let it leak out in public. I'd rather use my personal email address, accessed from home, so that (1) people can find me after I've left a particular job (if they save messages or find me in archives), and (2) I am clearly not representing the company. Oh, and (3): so I don't have to use Outlook for it.

All that said, while we were given a specific text to include verbatim, no one said we couldn't decorate it. Mine has an innocuous pair of <boilerplate> tags around it; someone else has formatted it to look like Pac-Man eating the dots.

[dsrtao]

don't post to mailing lists from work

That's a good move regardless of whether your company suffers from stupid disclaimer syndrome. Two more reasons for it: (4) so that you build up a reputation independent of your employer, and (5) so that you don't have to resubscribe to a thousand lists when your employer changes.