Superstition (garlic, silver bullets, disclaimers)02/13/2004 08:33:54 AMA number of readers have solicited my opinion on the vexed subject of disclaimers. Just how can you persuade Notes/Domino to append a disclaimer to outgoing Internet emails? This is technically something of a problem, but before answering that, you would do well to ponder why you need a disclaimer at all.
- The legal usefulness of disclaimers is somewhat questionable. Indeed, they are generally worth less than the paper they are all too frequently printed on. The fact that you choose at the time a document is created to write on that document that it has no legal significance does not make it so. Look no further than our recent Hutton Enquiry to see examples of emails being dragged into evidence still bristling with all the usual, legally nonsensical attempts to evade discovery.
- You trust your virus scanner. I don't care. Many disclaimers contain assertions to the effect that "This email is certified free of all known viruses by [insert name of anti-virus software]". By the time a user reads this email it has already been through my two virus scanners and been stripped of all sorts of files that I don't like. Regrettably, there remains a remote possibility that it contains a virus. Any assertion that an email is virus free is therefore also a waste of bytes.
- You don't trust your virus scanner. I still don't care. Yes, not infrequently I receive email that has a footer worded to the effect that "while we have done our best to ensure this email is virus free, we cannot guarantee that it is". Well at least it is honest but really! Why bother telling me?
- You assert ownership of all intellectual property contained in the email. This is a particular favourite of mine. Imagine this scenario. User downloads or otherwise obtains some happy snaps displaying bare naked ladies cavorting with farm animals. User knows someone who might be interested in seeing them. User forwards them to that someone and your email system appends a footnote to the effect that your company owns the intellectual property contained in the email. Now, did your company just steal some decidedly dodgy material? Does your company really want to own it? What about possible damage to brand/reputation?
- You do not own the opinions expressed in this email. I'm confused. Which is it? You own the IPR, but if anyone asserts an opinion, it is their problem, not yours. Get off the fence!
- If you are not the intended recipient, do not read this message but please notify the postmaster and delete all copies. Where to start with this madness? a) If it's that important, address it correctly. b) I already read it, does that mean you have to shoot me? c) I'm not busy. So obviously I will be delighted to notify your postmaster that you have fat fingers. Despite the fact that many, many sites still have no postmaster account (RFC2821 and others).
- Client or server?
Use the mail client to generate the disclaimer and the integrity of the resulting MIME or S/MIME message is likely to be pretty good (depending obviously on what the mail client is). But the user could deliberately delete it before sending.
- Generate it server side - hello broken MIME.
If the message is a multipart MIME message, then a server side disclaimer generator would need to:
- Parse the entire MIME stream and recognise all relevant text/plain and text/html alternatives.
- Insert the disclaimer at the end of the text/plain alternative.
- Insert an HTML version of the disclaimer at the correct spot in the text/html alternative - but where is the correct spot? Before </body> for sure. But if the message uses complex html or worse, CSS, it may still render very oddly or not at all.
- Re-encapsulate the MIME stream without breaking it.
- Parse the entire MIME stream and recognise all relevant text/plain and text/html alternatives.
- And hello broken S/MIME too.
If it had a signature, you just broke it.
The one possibility that might work reliably would be to include the disclaimer as an additional text/plain or text/html part in a multipart/mixed wrapper. But that is far from straightforward and I know of no disclaimer system that actually does this.
If the message already has a multipart/mixed structure (probably has attachments), then you need to modify that without breaking any nested multipart/related or alternative items. If it doesn't, you need to create a multipart/mixed MIME wrapper around the whole message, again without breaking the existing MIME.
Looks like pretty hard work for entirely questionable reasons to me. But if you have read this far, and you still want a disclaimer (I wash my hands), you won't easily achieve it with native Notes/Domino functionality (unless you eschew the use of client side MIME and that also has its issues).
Many content filtering solutions do offer this type of functionality. I have tested only one. Trend Scanmail has the ability to append disclaimer text to messages passing through it, though as far as I recall, this does not work with MIME messages.
Group IQ.Suite for Domino has similar functionality, though I have no direct experience of this.
No doubt others will pitch in here with suggestions if they feel strongly enough.
But before I sign off let me ask you one more time. Do you really need a disclaimer? Lots of very big and influential companies do not think they do. I have a mail box here full of items from the likes of IBM and Sun Microsystems. None of them has a disclaimer. Perhaps disclaimers really are just a waste of bytes.
Update: 27 July 2004: With ND6, you can add a disclaimer and preserve MIME fidelity if you wish. Here's how.
1. Richard Schwartz13/02/2004 21:06:52
Homepage: http://smokey.rhs.com/web/blog/rhs.nsf
This one get's put on my Required Reading list! Bravo!
-rich
2. Gerco Wolfswinkel15/02/2004 22:41:16
Homepage: http://www.wolfswinkel.net
I agree with Rich - I'm going to bookmark this one. Good stuff!
Gerco
3. Paul Howarth16/02/2004 11:41:39
More on this subject can be found at:
http://www.goldmark.org/jeff/stupid-disclaimers/
4. josh26/02/2004 13:19:37
You know, you cant keep blaming your users for wanting software that does what they want to do. Small wonder Lotus has such a small following, you seem to think anyone who would like a helpful feature is stupid, and here's why. Software is supposed to be USER friendly. Yes, i said it. Now come on.
5. Paul Benwell15/04/2004 12:03:15
Ahh the old users should get what they want routine... well why?
I have users who want to surf football fan sites all day, or look at pictures of naked ladies on the net. Should I let them? After all they are users and its what they want.
Email is a business tool. For business benefit. And I agree with Chris disclaimers are pointless. No one reads them, no one repects them, and as a solictor friend of mine says... totally worthless from ANY legal standpoint. So in the end just a waste of time and bandwidth.
6. Chris Linfoot15/04/2004 12:40:11
Well, I didn't reply to "josh" at the time because it scarcely seemed worth the bother of attempting to refute such an inarticulate and ill considered rant.
But actually, what user actually does want disclaimers anyway?
These are generally inflicted upon unwilling users and tech support staff by some PHB with time on his hands.
Not sure if "josh" is a PHB (somewhat doubt it), or just in league with one.
And BTW, I now have samples of disclaimers placed in both Notes/Domino and Outlook/Exchange messages that have in the former case broken what started out as perfect MIME, and in the latter case made already broken MIME utterly incomprehensible. All seem to have been put there by some third party software add-in that runs server side. Kind of proves the point that regardless of general merit, technically disclaimers are a real problem regardless of what the basic email platform is.
7. Chris Linfoot27/07/2004 13:51:48
Here is a method which you can use to add disclaimers to Internet email from Domino without compromising MIME fidelity.
http://chris-linfoot.net/plinks/CWLT-63AFUH
8. Stephan H. Wissel16/08/2004 16:43:44
Homepage: http://www.wissel.net
Hi Chris,
with most of the rant you are right. Disclaimers haven't been tested in a court of law. Text like "may contain confidential...." is useless, since if the sender doesn't know how should the receipient. And a confidentiality disclaimer needs to be ON TOP if it should have any effect.
Since eMail is a one-size-fits-all tool you have the funny situation, where clear violations of acceptable-use policies (the excursion in inter-species biology) and business records get the same treatment.
To make disclaimers truly effective the users would need to classify the type of message: private/informational/confidential/press release/business/etc.
Only then you can add (on client or server) a relevant disclaimer. Since most user wouldn't be bothered (besides the need to do some template tweaking) an attempt to do so will very likely fail.
However disclaimers can have appropriate uses:
A disclaimer can help to keep contracts to explicit action and reduce the risk of "accidental contraction". There are also cases where a disclaimer keeps you really out of trouble. Two examples in my curren jursidiction (Singapore). If you are a public servant sending emails you have to notify that the communication is protected by the "Official Secrets Act". Failing to do so prevents the enforement. Second: "The Corporate Act" requires starting from October, that every outgoing communication, that is business related (fax, letter, email -- not phone) carries the corporate registration number. Failure to do so can send you to jail (They are kind of rough here).
So there are cases out there...
If you want to testdrive iQ.Suite - I can arrange that.
stw
9. Chris Linfoot16/08/2004 17:03:48
Actually, business communication is supposed to include company registration number here too but that is a custom more honoured in the breach than the observance.
And as you may have noticed, I now have a solution that reliably puts a disclaimer on Notes email without breaking it although we do not have it implemented here.
Also, ND7 does this natively though I have not been able to make it work on a beta 2 test system here 
10. Chema20/09/2005 06:18:11
Homepage: http://www.multiasistencia.com
Hi! In first time, sorry for my english, and now my problem.
We are new users in Domino, and I want to put a commont mail footer for all Company. How may I do this?
Thanks
11. Chris Linfoot20/09/2005 09:23:22
Domino 7 does this natively using policies. Please read the documentation.
Domino 5 and 6 can be made to add a disclaimer:
- force all users to submit Internet email as Notes Rich Text, not MIME and
- modify the Memo form (and optionally other forms) in the server's mail.box to include the disclaimer taxt after the body
More details here:
http://chris-linfoot.net/plinks/CWLT-63AFUH
12. William Tell24/11/2006 20:58:22
You eat too much popcorn.
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