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Comment by ck2 | Hacker News Reader

That little thing (sometimes huge thing) people put at the end of their emails that "this is confidential" is also pointless as you cannot enter into a confidentiality agreement that way.

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That's an interesting point. A while ago I got an email that was clearly not intended for me with some big confidentiality warning on the bottom.

So I did as it said, deleted the email and informed the sender. Got a reply back saying "oh, sorry it was intended for xxx@xxx.com".

So then I get another one a few days later, this time I deleted it and forwarded it to the intended recipient. Then I informed the sender again getting no response.

Now about once a week I get this stuff into my account (which is basically a throwaway I hardly log into).

I assume I'm not expected to somehow play secretary for these people.

Next reply you should ask for a raise?

I get these too, except it's a cell phone bill for someone in Malaysia. I've tried repeatedly contacting someone at the company but all mails to them get returned as mailbox is full (it's 2012, how is anyone's mailbox full!?) and so they continue. I've even tried tweeting them but no luck. At this point I just mark it as spam, so sorry anyone in Malaysia that uses Celcom if your bills are going in to your spam folders.

Our in house council told us that the sad things about email disclaimers is that while they are useless in the sense that if you send it to someone by accident people can't be held accountable to what you put in it, they do have value.

Unfortunately due to the proliferation of these notices, if you don't include one then someone may have more legal leeway to do what they want with the email.

So its a sort of it's useless but if you don't put it in then it can hurt you a little more than if you don't, so let's just include it anyway.

It at least declares your intent for the message, which one presumably holds the copyright upon (although technically the company might own the copyright, I'm assuming that as the primary agent of the company in regard to that work, the author has some leeway). Unauthorized distribution of the mails would usually be a copyright violation, and excuses to the contrary can be negated by including a huge chunk of text that says "this must be private, seriously".

So yes, I see how it can help kind of but not really. It doesn't really change anything, just makes a case tighter should you need to make one, lest the defendant imply he had your authorization to distribute the mails.

IANAL.

You're wrong. (IANAL).

Let's say I'm a freelancer, and I enter into an NDA with company X. As part of the NDA, there is a definition of what exactly is the information that I need to keep confidential.

Now, my lawyers will push for a definition which is very specific and very explicit. How? They'll want Company X to mark every piece of confidential information with some kind of "confidential" mark. This way, I know explicitly about every piece of information that is supposed to be confidential.

Now, I'm guessing this is the same basic logic that big companies use when having this disclaimer. Anyone they've signed any kind of confidentiality agreement with might need to be explicitly told that this information is confidential.

This point still stands,

> you cannot enter into a confidentiality agreement that way

In your example, the confidentiality agreement (NDA) exists prior to the email.

I wish people would stop. It means in business emails there's a huge load of quoted confidentiality disclaimer stuff.

Please people, 3-line signatures.

I've often wondered what the total size per year is for corporate email legal disclaimers, both bandwidth and residing on disk, world-wide. Personal signatures would be an interesting stat as well.

Does Exchange (or any other mail servers) have some sort of de-duplication process for intra-message text like this? The wasted space has to be enormous in aggregate, but maybe compared to headers, attachments, etc. it doesn't end up being that big of a deal, especially for a single organization.

Mailinator has deduplicating. In fact, it has all sorts of nice optimizations, and the author writes about it quite eloquently. I wish mailinator backend could be used for mail servers instead of Exchange ;)

Maybe it's for the company to enforce against the employee. It shows the employee is aware the information they are sending is confidential.

The way I've seen it done usually is that the mail server tacks on the confidentiality notice after the user sends the message. So they would see it on a reply, but never on the initial message.

Maybe other companies show it to you on compose, I'm not sure.

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