Re: [OT] Vacation message heckling (Was: Re: Richard Dent - Annual Leave)

Valdis.Kletnieks
2006-07-18T14:43:53Z

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On Tue, 18 Jul 2006 09:27:04 EDT, Thomas Tuttle said:

> > This e-mail is confidential and privileged.
> Funny. Has anyone figured out if license agreements on email messages work?

The little case law that exists tends towards the view that if your site
is claiming that an out-of-clue message sent to 30K people is confidential,
you don't have a f**king *clue* what's actually confidential. This has a
number of interesting potential outcomes:

1) If you're a publicly traded company, a shareholder's lawsuit against the
CIO for mismanaging corporate sensitive data.

2) The possibility that "overwarning" (especially at the *end* of the message
where you've already looked at the contents) will negate any benefit of the
warning. (Basically, the legal variant of "the boy who cried wolf").

3) At least one lawyer has speculated that an opposing legal team could
try the following strategy: (a) show that *this* disclaimer must be a bogus
one the company attaches to *non* sensitive mail, (b) imply that actual
sensitive mail must therefor have a different disclaimer, and then (c)
subpoena all the e-mail with this disclaimer, since it's obviously not
considered *really* privileged by the company. Of course, if you're actually
using a one-size-fits-none disclaimer, you're in trouble then... :)

> contents: to do so is strictly prohibited and may be unlawful. Please
> inform us that this message has gone astray before deleting it. Thank you
> for your co-operation.

Let's all inform him his message went astray - obviously it was intended for
a recipient that lives in a universe where posting an e-mail to 30K people you
don't know is still confidential.... :)

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