Email Disclaimers and the Road to Hell

  "The road to hell is paved with good intentions."

Some of those good intentions are no doubt email disclaimers.  I'm sure you've seen them.  They are fairly commonplace in many corporations.  These are legalistic sounding statements added to the end of all out going emails automatically by the corporate email system.  You may not ever realize your company uses one since you don't see it when you compose your message, it is added by the system as it sends emails externally.  Take a look at some of your replies or send an email to your personal email to see if you have one.  They usually say something along the lines of:

"If you are not the intended recipient of this email please notify the sender, do not read the email and please destroy it."

Some disclaimers are longer and contain more provisions.  I've seen a disclaimer with more than 140 words, which is longer than the actual text of many emails.  The Register has a 2001 article describing various forms of disclaimers including an award for the longest disclaimer with 1,081 words!  They gave a number of awards for:

• Longest Disclaimer
• Most Incomprehensible Disclaimer
• Most Politically Correct Disclaimer
• Best Bi-lingual Disclaimer
• Best Spoof Disclaimer
• Special Award for Best WWW Disclaimer

These disclaimers usually written by a lawyer or someone in IT using other disclaimers as a template are well intentioned.  The good intentions are two-fold.  One intention is to protect the company from any liability.  The second good intention is to protect us from our own ineptitude.  The theory is that because emails are so easy to send and can be easily mis-addressed we need to have some legal cover in case they are mis-addressed.

It would seem like every few months someone would come to me and suggest that we add a disclaimer to our emails.  When I would ask why they would pause and sheepishly reply - I don't know, other company's have them so I thought we needed one too.  Before you blindly do it remember your mother's admonition, "Just because your friends jump off a bridge doesn't mean you have to do it too."

Although well intentioned, these disclaimers are at best meaningless and at worst send a very bad message about our company.  I think standardized disclaimers on every email are a bad idea and should be avoided for a number of reasons.

1. Disclaimers send out the wrong message.  What they are really saying is -- "Our employees are clueless, inept idiots that they mis-address emails and they do it so often that we need to add a disclaimer on all those mis-addressed emails."  Sure you can mis-address an email but how often does it really happen?
2. The disclaimer provisions often don't make sense.  Some examples:

   - If you are not the intended recipient do not read this email. - Rather a strange thing to say at the end of the email after they've already read it.

   - Any views expressed in this message are those of the individual sender and not those of Acme Widget.  I'm dealing with you as a representative of Acme Widget and I want them to stand behind the email contents not you.

   - Any disclosure, copying, or distribution of this message, or the taking of any action based on it, is strictly prohibited.  So exactly what should I do with your email and why did you bother sending it?

3. The disclaimers have no legal merit.  I say this based on my common sense but more importantly based on discussions with lawyers.

I'm sure someone reading this is saying, "Well, my lawyer said we needed one."  In some cases they may be right.  The problem is standardized disclaimers on all emails don't work and aren't needed.  Some emails you don't want shared with third parties, some you do, and some you don't care.  No standardized disclaimer can cover all cases.  The rule of thumb I use is that if you wouldn't put a disclaimer on the content if you were sending it as a written letter than you don't need a disclaimer on it as an email.  Do you really need a disclaimer on an email asking someone where they want to meet for lunch?  For those rare cases where you need a disclaimer attach one specifically written to the conditions of that particular email.

Hopefully when you send an email outside of the company it is because someone has something important they want to communicate.  Don't dimish the message by meaningless verbiage.  Afterall the types of awards I mentioned earlier really aren't the kind you want to win.

Disclaimer:  The opinions in this email are Mike Schaffner's and he really does mean it.  If you believe that you are reading this post in error don't worry.  It is intended to be read by as many people as possible.  Any copying, forwarding, quoting of this post is not only permitted but encouraged.

If this topic was of interest, you might also like these:

• Communicating Effectively - Which Language Are You Using?
• Or the posts in the "Communications" category