Blah blah blah
by Volker Weber
xxxxx xxxxxx will be out of the office starting 02.07.2004 and will not return until 11.07.2004.
I will respond to your message when I return.
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Diese E-Mail enthaelt vertrauliche oder rechtlich geschuetzte Informationen. Wenn Sie nicht der beabsichtigte Empfaenger sind, informieren Sie bitte sofort den Absender und loeschen Sie diese E-Mail. Das unbefugte Kopieren dieser E-Mail oder die unbefugte Weitergabe der enthaltenen Informationen ist nicht gestattet.
The information contained in this message is confidential or protected by law. If you are not the intended recipient, please contact the sender and delete this message. Any unauthorised copying of this message or unauthorised distribution of the information contained herein is prohibited.
How often do we have to hit corporate blockheads over the head until they either learn or die?
Comments
Corporate disclaimers like that annoy me intensely: have these stupid things actually been proven in a court of law I wonder?
corporate disclaimers have no legal base.
since emails are not legally binded. the only reasonable text within a disclaimer would be something like:
"this email might come from the given sender or from someone else. any information given within might not be the truth."
since smtp has no prove from whom the email was sent its hard to say that an email ist something you can trust about, or even more something that i would send confidential or protected content.
i was on the DNUG in hannover holding the Anti-Spam Workshop (introducing the use of spamassassin in a domino environment) and we got dr. andres martin-ehlers with us.
dr. martin-ehlers was holding a session with the title "Rechtliche Aspekte des Mailfilterings"
. (sorry, was unable to find any open source of his presentation). One of his sections was about the legal base of any email given the german law. the conclusion was that that email lacks the reliability about the sender, the receipient and you cant even make sure you've sent or received it ;)
PS: if this blog posting was more about the OOO - i hate out of office agents ;)
Greetings,
Sascha
I also dislike OOO.
Worst kind - OOO that responds (with garbage similar to this example) to some wholly innocent bystander after his/her address was spoofed by some virus.
Actually in this day and age, pretty much any auto-responder is just a plain stupid idea (and that includes challenge response anti spam systems IMHO).
What I really love is when the out of office agent replies to all the spammers who hit my Inbox approx. 200 times per day.
There’s nothing like returning to the office to find thousands of postmaster, delivery failure and mailer daemon-sourced mails on top of the usual spam. Marvellous fun...
at least lotus was a bit smart in designing the ooo, so that you only get hit by such an auto generated ooo message during the whole absence. worst thing ever: being on a 10k+ members mailinglist and having one member to ooo reply to every single messagelist mail. we had to temporaly remove him.
Wait a minute. You mean, I went through all these hoops to fix the broken OoO agent in my mail file, and now I cannot turn it on? :-)
ieek, nah. we had to remove the member, not the ooo. seesh :)
You never post to bugtraq or similar large-subscriber-base mailing lists, don't you? ;-)
You never post to bugtraq or similar large-subscriber-base mailing lists, don't you? ;-)
Surprise, surprise - there IS a use at least for those stupid disclaimers (which my current customer is adding to it's outgoing e-mail as well *sigh*): Make sure that there is some unique identifying pattern and then use it as a whitelisting token within your spam filter.
This ensures that the full-quoting morons don't accidentally trap themselves in the Junk folder ;)
What's even more annoying than disclaimers? Autoreplys. Usually sent in reply to every single e-mail. Here's one of my favorites:
--snip--
(Diese Nachricht wurde automatisch generiert)
Ihre Nachricht ist bei uns eingegangen.
Sollte Ihre Nachricht ausserhalb unserer Geschäftszeiten
eintreffen, bitten wir um Verständnis, dass eine Bearbeitung erst am folgenden Werktag erfolgen kann.
Eilige, sehr wichtige oder fristwahrende Mitteilungen sind
daher - auch aufgrund möglicher technischer Störungen - zusätzlich per Fax oder per Post zu senden.
Außerdem weisen wir darauf hin, dass wir in Ihrem Interesse
aus rechtlichen und sicherheitstechnischen Gründen auf diesem Weg keine rechtsgeschäftlichen Erklärungen (Aufträge etc.) entgegennehmen.
Wir bitten hierfür um Ihr Verständnis.
--snip--
