Email Disclaimer Won't be disappearing soon from Sir Alan Duncan's parliamentary emails

Email Disclaimers Won't be disappearing soon from Sir Alan Duncan's parliamentary emails.

I asked MP Alan Duncan if the disclaimer would be removed from his emails and he kindly
responded.

If I was him, I would probably add a line:

Please Ignore the UK Parliament Disclaimer

Dear Martin

Alas, no!

It is up to the parliamentary authorities to determine the standard disclaimer that attaches to e-mails, not individual MPs, and I am not able to remove it from my own outgoing messages.

Regards

Alan Duncan

UK Parliament Disclaimer: This e-mail is confidential to the intended recipient. If you have received it in error, please notify the sender and delete it from your system. Any unauthorised use, disclosure, or copying is not permitted. This e-mail has been checked for viruses, but no liability is accepted for any damage caused by any virus transmitted by this e-mail.

ANDREW GRIFFIN   Telegraph, Thursday 08 January 2015

Long disclaimers at the bottom of emails should be banned, according to MPs.

Sir Alan Duncan has said that the emails cause “forests’ worth of paper”, and has presented a bill to ban the practice.

He has presented a bill to parliament that would ban the practice for public companies, telling MPs that the disclaimers should be replaced with a short link.

Printing out emails often means accidentally printing all of the disclaimer at the bottom, which can add up to a number of pages.

Email disclaimers usually include messages telling those receiving them to respect confidentiality and copyright, and information about viruses and the scanning that has been done to the message. They are usually sent by default, being appended to any external emails on their way out so that people might not even be aware they’re being included.

But they are mostly useless, according to The Economist. They impose a one-way contract on the person receiving them, and are therefore mostly impossible to enforce, at least in Europe.

They continue to cling on partly because company lawyers insist on using them since everyone else is, the Economist said.