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

Wed Sep 9 20:10:54 UTC 2015

On Wed, 9 Sep 2015, 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.

I can see both sides of this:
1. People who post to this list from a work email address often have no 
control over what their employer appends to the end of their outgoing 
emails.  The footers in question are usually added after the fact because 
someone in a position of authority at $employer says it needs to be there.

2. A half-page of legalese boilerplate following a one-line message on a 
mailing list that goes out to many thousands of people can be a bit 
irritating.

The compromise would seem to be to use a third-party email account for 
subscribing to mailing lists, but there could be environments where that 
doesn't fly with those same people in positions of authority...

jms

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Larry Sheldon <larrysheldon at cox.net>
> Sender: "NANOG" <nanog-bounces at nanog.org>Date: Tue, 8 Sep 2015 03:56:30
> To: <nanog at nanog.org>
> Subject: Re: Extraneous "legal" babble--and my reaction to it.
>
> On 9/8/2015 03:31, Rich Kulawiec wrote:
>> On Sun, Sep 06, 2015 at 09:14:02PM +0000, Connor Wilkins wrote:
>>> Honestly.. the best method is to not let it bug you anymore. It's
>>> only a seething issue to you because you let it be.
>>
>> Curiously enough, the same thing was said about spam 30-ish years ago.
>> The "ignore it and maybe it will go away" approach did not yield
>> satisfactory results.
>>
>> These "disclaimers" are stupid and abusive.  They have no place in
>> *any* email traffic, and most certainly not in a professional forum.
>> And it is unreasonable to expect the recipients of the demands and
>> threats they embody to silently tolerate them ad infinitum.
>
> Exactly so.
> JHD
>
>
> -- 
> sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (Juvenal)
>