Irritating and useless

Ever seen signatures like these at the end of a mail message from a sales or recruiting guy? An example:

"Notice: This transmittal and/or attachments may be privileged or confidential. If you are not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that you have received this transmittal in error; any review, dissemination, or copying is strictly prohibited. If you received this transmittal in error, please notify us immediately by reply and immediately delete this message and all its attachments. Thank you."

Trust me, this one is quite tame. But I have seen a lot worse. The irritating thing is that those things are utterly useless. They just take up space, and they have no legal grounding. Take a look at the word "copying" in that little blurb. Any act on the damn internet is an automatic copy. And the rest is just plain unenforceable.

These kind of signatures tell me a couple of things:

• You are clueless
• You just want to come over as important (and by using that signature, you probably aren't)
• You have no idea or concept on how the Internet works.
• You are probably not a lawyer, so I won't take your legal advice if you don't mind.
• You are probably in sales, recruiting, accounting or some other position that requires you to wear a tie
• Did I say you were clueless?

That said, don't use those those disclaimers at the end of your mail. It makes you look like a retard.