On Fri, Jan 11, 2013 at 09:14:33AM -0500, Ben Abbott wrote:
> By emailing a public mail-list you've effectively forwarded your email
> to many (thousands? ... millions?) of people, which appears to
> indicate you've violated the postscript/footer at the end of your
> email.
>
> http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gnu.octave.general/46040
>
> http://octave.1599824.n4.nabble.com/FW-SOURCE-FILES-FOR-WIN-7-X64-tt4648769.html
>
> https://mailman.cae.wisc.edu/pipermail/help-octave/2013-January/056469.html
>
> In any event, I suggest you remove the "CONFIDENTIAL" postscript from
> your email. Otherwise its nefarious tone may discourage some
> otherwise helpful individuals from responding .... as a response will
> result in your message being forwarded again to a large number of
> people.
I'm getting tired of these comments on this list, really. I'm subscribed
to over a dozen mailing list and the Octave lists are the only ones
where this issue comes up at all.
Will you people please understand that the sender of such emails have
exactly zero control over the footers? They might be added by the
outgoing mail server automatically.
For the occasional value of a "confidential" footer, just read
http://www.out-law.com/page-5536
When sending emails from the account of my (now previous) employer, my
signature had 10 lines -- and every single line of them was required by
law! Yes, by law, not the company lawyers.
If you understand German, just have a look at
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signatur_(E-Mails_im_Gesch%C3%A4ftsverkehr)#Inhalt_bzw._Pflichtangaben_in_der_Signatur
So, to summarize:
1) It's entirely pointless to educate people about legal footers - they
will rarely have a chance to change them.
2) The times when a footer had at most 5 lines are long over.
I'm sorry, but I don't agree. IMO the actual question is: should the poster even be allowed to use his/her coporate email to acces public mailing list? In this particular case, the footer says:
- if you're not the recipient, you must delete the message; so basically everybody should delete it and no-one should answer
- you are not allowed to copy or forward the e-mail; so if such e-mail by accident contain actual confidential information, because of the presence of the footer, could the octave project be held liable for resending the email to thousands of people?
Michael.