Sir Alan Duncan MP: Ending e-mail disclaimer ‘nonsense’

Ahead of today's debate on the matter, Sir Alan Duncan MP calls to abolish email disclaimers ‘once and for all.’ It is time to put an end to one of the worst scourges of the internet age- the e-mail disclaimer. My Ten Minute Rule Bill before the Commons today seeks to do just that, abolishing them once and for all, starting with all UK government departments, agencies and companies.At the end of every e-mail that lands in our inboxes is a boilerplate paragraph instructing us in strong terms what to do if we are not the intended recipient. We must, we are told, destroy the e-mail. Erase it from our hard drives and our memories. Under no circumstances can we copy it, forward it, store it or disclose the information within it. In any case, it does not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the careless sender, who incidentally we must alert to their carelessness immediately. All this is, as we all know, nonsense. Barely anyone reads disclaimers and even fewer people pay attention to them. Their legal admissibility is extremely questionable, since they attempt to unilaterally bind someone into a contract without asking their permission. And by putting them at the bottom of the e-mail, rather than the top, the sender is attempting to shut the stable door after the horse has bolted. Not so much ‘Do not read this’ as ‘Pretend you didn’t’. The worst offenders stretch into the hundreds of words, each more meaningless than the last. They serve no purpose beyond trying to scare an unintended recipient into compliance should they stumble across an embarrassing e-mail not meant for their eyes.The truth is that they have proliferated not because they are genuinely needed but because everyone else uses them. And so we are forced to scroll through screen after screen of them on our phones and to inadvertently print out ream after ream of paper as they clog up the bottom of e-mail chains. Some even have the cheek to ask us to think about whether we needed to print them. The answer is of course ‘no’ and the solution is to get rid of them in the first place.