Extraneous "legal" babble--and my reaction to it.

Wed Sep 9 16:42:57 UTC 2015

On 09/09/2015 06:36 AM, Dovid Bender wrote:
> I am trying to understand why the legal babble bothers anyone. Does
> it give you a nervous twitch? Remind you why you hate legal? It's
> just text at the bottom of your email.

It's all about best practices.

In an e-mail thread, where the thread grows with each response, the 
original e-mail etiquette is that people put their reply at the bottom 
of the message.  The theory behind the practice is that when you are 
going back to read the message later, you can read it top-down and get 
the contributions in chronological order.  (And only save the last one, 
instead of all of them.)

If you have a huge disclaimer in your sig, when the reader goes to the 
bottom of the e-mail to read the latest contribution, they have to back 
up over the over-large signature block.  This is irritating.  For some 
readers using non-graphical e-mail clients or Web clients, that 
irritation can grow to the point that the message gets tossed.

That's why the Best Practices RFC said to have no more than three lines 
in your .sig of at most 71 characters each.

With AOL and "Forever September", some of these things get lost in the 
waves and waves of non-compliance, not because people don't want to be 
good citizens, but because they don't know better.  And, if you aren't 
keeping the entire thread (such as what I'm doing here), you trim quotes 
to the absolute minimum to maintain context, so that people don't have 
to wade through the whole mess.

It also avoids top-posting, which in some circles is Bad Form(tm).

By the way, it's never been about cat videos...