Tarkblog

Is anyone else getting tired of the extra fluff that appears at the bottom of many corporate emails today?

I think too many IT departments are so concerned with CYA syndrome that they don’t think about what’s going on. Whenever I get an email from my mom, who works for the state of Indiana, it has this in it:

Please Note:
The information contained in this E-mail and/or attachments may contain protected health, legally privileged, or otherwise confidential information intended only for the use of the individual(s) named above. If you, the reader of this message, are not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that you may not further disseminate, distribute, disclose, copy or forward this message or any of the content herein. If you have received this E-mail in error, please notify the sender immediately and delete the original.

Another customer has this in their emails:

This e-mail transmission and any attachments to it are intended solely for
the use of the individual or entity to whom it is addressed and may contain
confidential and privileged information. ?If you are not the intended
recipient, your use, forwarding, printing, storing, disseminating,
distribution, or copying of this communication is prohibited. ?If you
received this communication in error, please notify the sender immediately
by replying to this message and delete it from your computer.

I’m pretty sure none of you read those two paragraphs above - you casually glanced over them and jumped straight to this part. I’ve got one, which I cannot attach here for confidentiality reasons, which is 22 lines long. That’s longer than any of the emails I have actually read from the person who sends them.

Who do you think decides what to put here? And how do they decide what to put? Is it the IT department head, or is the the CTO issuing some kind of mandate from the board? And do they actually think there’s any validity to it?

Tark, I say.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 22nd, 2004 at 1:22 pm and is filed under Random Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.