New FAQ entry - NO DISCLAIMERS PLEASE

[Brian J. Tarricone]

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On 10/13/2005 1:31 PM, Auke Kok wrote:
> I'm going to add another entry to the Xfce ML FAQ withg roughly the 
> following contents:
> 
> ===
> 
> Please, under all circumstances try to avoid posting messages with 
> corporate disclaimers or warnings. These messages are useless, mean 
> nothing legally, are annoying and sometimes outrageous, waste our time 
> trying to find the real content in your message, waste our bandwidth, 
> lower the quality of the mailinglist, and are just plain *annoing*.
> 
> If your corporation requires you to use disclaimers in any way, please 
> sign up for a free webmail acount such as gmail, hotmail or others!
> 
> ===
> 
> I reserve the right to refuse messages to our mailinglists which contain 
> these disclaimers. Thanks for your consideration.

I'm against this, for the following reasons:

1.  They actually do have legal meaning in some jurisdictions, though
it's somewhat useless when posted to a mailing list with several hundred
recipients and a public archive.

2.  Some company mail servers (like the one where I work) automatically
append the disclaimer to outgoing email, so there's nothing people can
do.  Though I'd argue that people shouldn't be posting here from their
work email, unless their question is related to their job, but whatever.

3.  Refusing messages is a bit harsh, and while yes, you are the server
admin, this isn't your mailing list.  If you want to implement this
policy for the Lunar lists, that's certainly your prerogative.  I don't
see why we need to be such jackasses about it.  (Yes, that was me saying
we don't need to be jackasses.  Mark your calendars; it probably won't
happen again.)

4.  Bandwidth is cheap.  (Yes, really, it is.)  If we can't handle a net
increase of a few hundred kB per month (or even, to be conservatively
outrageous, a few tens of MBs) due to a few disclaimers on emails from
the mailing lists, we're in trouble.  The bandwidth is donated, anyway,
so it's not like you can point to someone specifically (not even Remco)
and say they're being financially hurt by silly disclaimers at the
bottom of emails.

5.  As long as the disclaimers are at the bottom, and preceeded by a
signature, or at least the sender signing their name, I have no problem
finding content in the message.

6.  Sometimes they make me laugh.

7.  I'm sure there's a #7, and possibly a #8 and #9, but I'm lazy.

	-brian

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