On Saturday 30 October 2004 09:47, Ewan Davis wrote:
> Midge wrote:
> sed 's/^ This e-mail is confidential and privileged//g'
>
> would globally replace any line starting at the left margin with "of
> asterisks" with absolutely nothing.
Substitute "This e-mail is" for line of asterisks, sorry about the C&P error.
> <snip>
>
> This raises the interesting question (at least to the anally retentive) of
> the legal effect of such removal, given that while the receiver knows they
> have probably removed some sort of disclaimer they can't know its specific
> terms probably removing any possible impact such questionable disclaimers
> may have
True of course. But one's email client and MTA between them already remove
much of the content of an (RFC 2822) email from the display.
Some phishing scams take advantage of particular email clients' helpfulness in
such matters.
Historically I believe that many people choose to remove everything that comes
after the --\n in a signature - this is clearly information that is inside
the SMTP envelope (the headers that wrap the content of an email in order to
get it to the right place and say how it was carried) so that is one
precedent.
A question that would be asked would be whether anyone actually expected a
recipient to read down to the very end of the message (<INCLUDE top posting
argument and deprecatory remark>) and if they did whether they expected that
anyone would actually read the content of a routine notice. I think
empirically the true answers to those would be "no" and "no".
On occasion when I care about who gets to see something, I put a circulation
line at the top of the text, but only one line. Anyone wanting a letter to
an editor published will put the circulation notice in the subject or above
the material it applies to.
The model that gave rise to these notices is a cynical one, perhaps that goes
without saying, but also is one that relates to paper documents or faxes,
where the content of previous correspondence will not intervene between the
last line of (new) content the reader is expected to read and the notice
telling him what may be done with it.
--
Adrian Midgley Open Source software is better
GP, Exeter http://www.defoam.net/
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