Problems appending Stupid Email Disclaimers
For discussion of the issues in general, see the
main document on stupid email disclaimers.
Most of the content of this particular document is based on a message
posted by David Webb of mdx.ac.uk. Much
of this is quoted verbatim, although I have made a few changes. It
was posted to a mailing list used by email system administrators, and
it is used here by permission.
There appear to be 4 ways of applying these disclaimers ranging from
the absolutely stupid to the plain silly.
- The Absolutely Stupid way
- This of course is the way most people appear to be applying these
Have the mailhub apply the disclaimer to the text bodypart of the message.
- Many messages don't have any text body parts.
eg Someone sends a Word document or an Image.
- The first part of the message may not be a text bodypart.
Should you add your disclaimer to text bodyparts further in the
mail message - The recipient may not bother to read them.
A subsequent text-bodypart may be a multi-part alternative part
in which case it may not be presented to be read.
Should you add your disclaimer to every text bodypart?
- If your mail message passes through your mailhub multiple times
(for instance by being forwarded from user to user) should you
append the disclaimer multiple times. Can your mail system detect
that the disclaimer has already been added?
(what performance impact will all this checking have ?)
- If the mail message is to automatically processed - such processing
could be a simple message to a list server or could be to some other
automatic mail handling system - will the handling be able to cope with
the appending of your disclaimer.
- A future extension of the problem in 4 will be the wide use of XML
- Will a PGP signed message still have a valid signature after the mailhub
has tampered with the message ?
- If your disclaimer is added to a text/html message will the message
still display in all html-aware mail clients? Will the disclaimer be
- The Stupid way
Have the mailhub add a new text body-part containing the disclaimer
at the start of the message.
- Some messages have well defined body-part structures (eg NOTARY
messages) which would be destroyed by adding in a new body-part.
- Automatic processing of messages would probably be affected
again. The receiving system may well just be expecting the
message to only have one part and after seeing your disclaimer
is not a valid message may discard the whole message without
seeing subsequent parts.
- Adding a new body-part may be extremely complicated if the
message already consisted of a number of multi-part alternative
and nested body-parts. If this is not done correctly clients may
not be able to read the message correctly
- The Fairly Silly way
- Individual users put this disclaimer in their own signatures.
- Difficult to enforce. Leading to lots of false negatives.
- The Merely Silly way
- The mailhub puts the disclaimer (or a pointer to a web-page containing
the disclaimer) in the message headers.
This does not alter the content or structure of the message and would
from a mail managers point of view be the best solution.
- Most mail clients do not display the headers by default.
Hence no one will see the disclaimer.
Version: $Revision: 1.5 $
Last Modified: $Date: 2008/06/19 12:42:57 $ GMT
Maintained by: Jeffrey Goldberg