DISCLAIMER: Disclaimers are generally worthless
17 Dec 2004 
around evening time 
Matt Winckler
I just love company email disclaimers. They’re so foolish. I got this one tagged onto the end of an email from a friend today:
The contents of this electronic message and any attachments are intended only for the addressee and may contain privileged or confidential information. If you are not the addressee, you are notified that any transmission, distribution, downloading, printing or photocopying of the contents of this message or attachments is strictly prohibited. The privilege of confidentiality attached to this message and any attachments is not waived, lost or destroyed by reason of mistaken delivery to you. If you receive this message in error, please notify the sender by return email or telephone by calling [Phone Number Censored].
Most normal people recognize this gibberish for what it is: completely unenforceable nonsense. I have found that it helps to simply mentally replace statements such as this with the following translation (found in a newsgroup a few weeks ago):
We’re total losers who couldn’t proofread an e-mail address if our business depended on it, which our lawyers advise us is actually the case. Instead of setting up an easy-to-use address book to handle and verify addresses, we are going to put some totally meaningless and legally-irrelevant boilerplate disclaimer on every message we send so that there will be no doubt as to our guaranteed status as bona-fide losers.
If you received this e-mail by mistake, we’re screwed, because we can’t bind you to a contract just because you read something you shouldn’t have. Not only that, but by the time you read these instructions about how you weren’t supposed to read it, you would have already read through the stuff you weren’t supposed to read…and boy doesn’t that make us look like complete morons (in the event that there was any doubt earlier).
All of this is assuming we included some information that would let you determine that you are not, in fact, the intended recipient of this e-mail–which we probably didn’t, because we’ve heard that ‘redundant’ means ‘unnecessary’, because that’s what they called the guy who used to sulk in the basement and make the computers go before they fired him.