Corporate e-mail footers

Does anybody else think that a 431 word disclaimer is perhaps a little bit excessive?

Updated: It would appear that it’s a legal require­ment now: Is your Company Website in breach of UK laws — specific­ally the 2007 Companies Act?

9 Responses to “Corporate e-mail footers”

1. Weon

Yeah, it’s a real waste of paper.

2. matt

Aren’t email disclaim­ers actually not legally binding too?

3. matt

Good spot, Olly, but that’s only corpor­ate inform­a­tion, not the disclaimer, so I still go with the disclaimer’s a load of woody nonsense, but having the info that your link mentions is good, probably

However I seem to have a lot of sites to add this to now (thanks!), and have you ever tried to *explain* to someone how to add footers automat­ic­ally to email?

4. Olly

Phone their host and get them to do it at server level ;-)

5. matt

I went one better, I passed it onto someone else!

6. rich

Technically it’s not a legal requirement.

It must be included in “business letters”, email isn’t neces­sar­ily a “business letter”, however most people seem to take the easy way out and plaster it over everything, mainly just to piss me off I think.

I keep telling people at work that the mailserver I run doesn’t support boiler­plate footers like that :)

7. Leon

I had to imple­ment the new footer at work  — so now at least every­one has the same signa­ture, and no images!!

8. Steve

Hm. Re-writing our stand­ards now. Think I’ll continue with the ‘Disclaimers are stupid’ policy. ‘And get rid of that flash­ing pink Comic Sans RIGHT NOW’.

9. Nick

Yeah, it’s a real waste of paper.”

We tag a don’t print out unless you need to onto our emails as well. Not sure how much extra CO2 is gener­ated sending the extra bytes :-)

When it comes to access­ib­i­lilty I hate that the autogen­er­ated code from sites like google search or flickr or name offend­ing website here that you can ‘cut and paste’ into your own website almost always needs tweak­ing to meet WCAG guidelines. Why can’t they give us WCAG compli­ant code in the first place?

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