Email disclaimer

The Jolly Contrarian’s Glossary The snippy guide to financial services lingo.™ →Go uptown Index — Click the ᐅ to expand: Glossary Tell me more Sign up for our newsletter — or just get in touch: for ½ a weekly 🍺 you get to consult JC. Ask about it here.

A window into the soul of your correspondent (or, where harnessed to the great steampunk machine of a multinational corporation, that entity’s blackened soul). An extract of plain text, appended to every outbound communication, canvassing any one or more of the following subjects:

• Its confidentiality
• Its copyright
• Its privilege (despite its protestations, misdirected emails will rarely be legally privileged)
• Its potential inaccuracy
• Its epidemiological virulence;
• The receiver’s moral duty to destroy it if sent in error.

An email disclaimer will also wax lengthily about what it is not:

• • Professional advice;
  • An offer or solicitation of an offer — and IN ANY CASE NOT TO RESIDENTS OF NEW HAMPSHIRE;
  • A recommendation to do anything or not do anything (Stop and think about this juicy double negative for a while: “We are not telling you not to do anything”.)

All of this served up in the certain knowledge no person having enough adult literacy to comprehend an email disclaimer would — or even could — be dim-witted enough to ever read it, much less care about what it says.

Which begs the question: what do we think we are achieving with an email disclaimer? Which part of the sky would fall upon our heads were it not there?