Disclaimers in emails — Please stop

I hate disclaimers in emails. You know the ones which are injected into most corporate emails at the bottom. They usually say something like

…if you are not the intended recipient…then you should not read, distribute…the contents of this email…

Let’s concentrate on first few words which are commonly found in email disclaimers. Most of them say something to the tune of “…if you are not intended”. The big question here is who’s intention are we talking about? The sender or receiver? It is you (the sender) who is sending me the email so you intended it to be delivered it to me. And in case you made a mistake of typing in an incorrect email address, it still is not my problem as I have no idea about about your intentions.

My second gripe with these disclaimers is the location of their placement. They are always placed at the bottom of the email. When receiver gets an email he/she does not scroll to the bottom to see if there is any notice or disclaimer they should be aware of. They just get on with the content.

Dear Jon Snow,

We regretfully inform you that there are no annual leaves at the wall. Your leave application is hereby rejected. Get on with the work and stop thinking about the wildling girl.

Kind Regards,

Leader of Night’s watch

And way down below it may say

And as per this disclaimer we’ll have to cut your head off for reading this email. You should have read this disclaimer before anything. Yes we know we are stupid because if we intended for the disclaimer to be read earlier then we would have placed it above the main content. But we don’t care. You are screwed.

Seriously? If the email and it’s contents are so important and confidential then why not put the damn disclaimer on top in big bold red font? You can’t because you know that the entire disclaimer stupidity is not your doing, you are just following in the footsteps of the ones who came before you.

And in case the contents are genuinely confidential and should not be seen by anyone other than the intended (there we go again) recipient, create a pdf file and password protect it. Exchange the password by some other means and include the password protected pdf in the email. How hard is that?

Yes I know that passwords can be cracked but a password protected pdf cannot be opened unless the recipient has the correct password or an attempt is made to crack it. In any case you as a sender would have saved a poor recipient from reading something he/she was not intended to.

Please stop putting disclaimers in emails. And if you must then put them on top.