Wolfgang Denk wrote:
In message OF870B63B5.7D50724B-ON8525738A.00768F45-8525738A.00770EE3@orbital.com you wrote:
NOTE: just disregard the legalese attached to this message, if you are reading this... odds are you should be reading this.
No, we cannot ignore this. By posting such a message to a mailing list which gets internationally distributed without restrictions you are violating your own company's regulations, and we are supposed to report you for that to your managemen.
Please turn this off. If necessary, use a different mail account for posting to mailing lists.
Best regards, Wolfgang Denk
Dear Wolfgang,
While I agree with you in principle and believe that those disclaimers are a bunch of worthless drivel (and I cannot see how they possibly could be useful from a legal standpoint), I have to empathize with Roger.
In big companies those disclaimers are auto-attached to all email (!!!inside!!! as well as outside). Not only that, but many companies (my own included) block access to all of the common "free" email services (gmail, yahoo, juno, etc.). The only alternative is to not subscribe to the list at work, which would hurt information flow on the u-boot list.
In my case, it is only an oversight by the IT department that this email doesn't have a stupid pseudo-legal disclaimer on it - the mail handling path I use bypasses the primary corporate Exchange servers. I would not be surprised if this bypass goes away in a matter of months as a side effect of our cutover of our IT resources to our new overlords.
By the way, the disclaimer drivel is very likely part of the Microsoft conspiracy to allow self-important idiots to control vital company resources - I suspect Exchange is involved in most, if not all, of the disclaimer attachment crimes. Note that the people that control these disclaimers are the same ones that habitually send 500KB-2.2MB Word documents as attachments... said 500KB document containing *one page* of actual text.
Best regards, gvb
P.S. Years ago, when the stupid disclaimers became the rage and one was implemented locally, I noticed that IT was smart enough to not put second and third disclaimers on email replies (we've since lost even that minimal level of intelligence). I experimented and found that they implemented keyword matching to trigger the disclaimer or not. As a result, I was able to put my own cut down version that was about half the size of the original (and made twice as much sense ;-). Unfortunately, eventually the IT department caught on, probably as a result of bounces, and switched to a full match, making my subterfuge ineffective. :-/