Subject: Avoiding legal email signatures

From: Bruce Momjian <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 9 Jun 2007 18:14:00 -0400 (EDT)

I know we have talked about how to avoid legal email signatures on this
list.  One idea would be for a small percentage of our users to ignore
emails with a legal signature.  I know I am less likely to reply to such
an email.

If enough people do that, it might coerce people to avoid them, and
perhaps we could put something in the FAQ about it.

-- 
  Bruce Momjian  <[email-masked]>          http://momjian.us
  EnterpriseDB                               http://www.enterprisedb.com

  + If your life is a hard drive, Christ can be your backup. +

---

From: Andrew Sullivan <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 10 Jun 2007 12:23:10 -0400

> emails with a legal signature.  I know I am less likely to reply to such

The problem with that is that you ding people inside large
corporations that are _trying_ to adopt PostgreSQL in the face of
bad corporate policies (like "we standardise on product O" or "all
outbound email gets garbage L appended").  Moreover, people who are
in such environments are often prevented from visiting gmail,
hotmail, or the other likely suspects in order to send their messages
in circumvention of corporate policy.  And remember, such people may
not actually be able to prevent the signature going on by just
ignoring policy -- often, it's added at the gateway on the way out
of the server.

I know they're irritating and stupid, but in the context of a mailing
list they also have zero effect, because the mailing list address is
explicitly public.  I also know that they use extra space in the list
archive, but if we attempted to purge the list archives of every
worthless bit of nonsense in there, surely this wouldn't be the
number one thing on the list (the semi-annual eruption of knee-jerk
"threads are better" discussions probably take more room, for
example).

What we _could_ do, I suppose, is start mail-writing campaigns to
legal departments in companies that insist on such disclaimers,
pointing out the folly of their ways and asking that the policy be
changed to distinguish between list-posting and non-list-posting
accounts.

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan  | [email-masked]
The plural of anecdote is not data.
		--Roger Brinner

---

From: Greg Smith <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 10 Jun 2007 12:33:58 -0400 (EDT)

> perhaps we could put something in the FAQ about it.

You should just say flat-out that the terms of the mailing list are 
incompatible with confidentiality and similar legal disclaimers because 
the way messages are archived make that technically impossible.  Put it in 
the FAQ, put it in the message people get when they subscribe.  Then 
enforce similarly to how bad top posting is dealt with now:  everyone 
understands that people get only a curt response, perhaps just a pointer 
to the relevant documentation, and instead are told the specifics of their 
messages can't be addressed on the list while there's a disclaimer 
attached.

Just ignoring them altogether will just give the community a bad 
reputation for being unresponsive.

--
* Greg Smith [email-masked] http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD

---

From: Greg Smith <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 10 Jun 2007 12:50:11 -0400 (EDT)

On Sun, 10 Jun 2007, Andrew Sullivan wrote:

> Moreover, people who are in such environments are often prevented from 
> visiting gmail, hotmail, or the other likely suspects in order to send 
> their messages in circumvention of corporate policy.

This is all true, but the reality here is that people in such a situation 
are usually flat-out violating their corporate policy by posting to the 
list at all from inside this kind of company.  By allowing it, you're 
encouraging them to do something they may very well get into trouble for. 
I've watched more than one attempt to sneak open-source source into a 
large enterprise get completely blown away because unapproved mailing list 
involvement to resolve issues became associated with making corporate 
information public.

Ever watched someone get fired for responding to "can you post your config 
file?" in an environment where that's a clear violation of corporate 
policy?  I have.

> What we _could_ do, I suppose, is start mail-writing campaigns to legal 
> departments in companies that insist on such disclaimers

The best reaction to this issue is to kick it back with apologies to the 
person who wants help.  They're in a better position than you to 
straighten out the incompatiblity of their corporation with the 
requirements of a public mailing list.  You may very well be doing them a 
favor to point out the concern rather than continuing a dialog with them.

---

From: "Joshua D. Drake" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 10 Jun 2007 10:56:34 -0700

Greg Smith wrote:
> the way messages are archived make that technically impossible.  Put it 
> in the FAQ, put it in the message people get when they subscribe.  Then 
> to the relevant documentation, and instead are told the specifics of 
> their messages can't be addressed on the list while there's a disclaimer 
> attached.

Haven't we been over this at least once before? Greg is right, just 
document the point and leave it alone. If you want to get really picky 
about, make the confirmation email from the subscription process 
specifically state that confirming subscription is an acceptance of the 
PostgreSQL.Org usage policies which can be found here (insert link).

Have the usage policies state that by using our lists they are giving up 
any confidentiality or propreitary gains because the list is *public*.

Joshua D. Drake

> ---------------------------(end of broadcast)---------------------------
> TIP 6: explain analyze is your friend
>

---

From: "Joshua D. Drake" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 10 Jun 2007 10:58:56 -0700

> emails with a legal signature.  I know I am less likely to reply to such

Bah.... Bruce come on. The people that are sending the emails with those 
disclaimers "DO NOT HAVE A CHOICE". They are being forced to do so by 
upper management and legal.

Should we penalize the poor guy in IT that just wants to use our great 
product because his boss and attorney's are idiots? If we did that, most 
people on this list would be penalized. Regardless of the legal disclaimer.

Joshua D. Drake

---

From: Andrew Sullivan <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 10 Jun 2007 14:04:14 -0400

On Sun, Jun 10, 2007 at 12:50:11PM -0400, Greg Smith wrote:

> list at all from inside this kind of company.  

We don't know that in advance, and we can't know it, either.  If
someone wants to do something wrong, that's not our responsibility or
fault; and by posting to a mailing list, the purported cover offered
by the disclaimer is lost (on this we seem to have ample agreement).

> involvement to resolve issues became associated with making corporate 

It might not be "sneaking"; it might in fact be two camps within a
company disagreeing about this.  Imagine, for instance, the case
where the operations department of a company (to which the current
DBAs report) are opposed to any changes, because their Oracle DBAs
feel threatened and their boss thinks his career is enhanced by a
large budget under management.  At the same time, the new product
development department is under pressure to lower costs and deliver
new services without adding more licenses.  Since operations controls
the mail servers and the firewalls (and are adding the disclaimer),
the developers will get no help from the operations people in making
things work better.  But if the developers really do deliver a new
service that costs substantially less than, say, what it would have
with Oracle, Postgres gradually finds a place in the company.  And
these developers have a mandate to change things.  That's how change
happens in large companies, and we have to remember that we won't be
talking to the people who don't want the change to happen.

> file?" in an environment where that's a clear violation of corporate 

You bet.  But what we seem to be asking in this thread is that people
find some way to violate what is clearly a corporate policy, or we
won't help them.  We don't _know_ whether some other policy is being
violated, and it's not our responsibility to know it either.  Since
we claim that we have such great community support, though, we do
have a responsibility at least to try to support people.

Perhaps we make a policy that corporate-style ("disclaimered") mail
is encouraged to seek support via corporate-style channels (e.g. is
pointed at the commercial support companies).  I'm uncomfortable with
such a policy, but it'd be better than "ignore these nasty corporate
victims", which is what the proposal so far sounds like to me.

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan  | [email-masked]
I remember when computers were frustrating because they *did* exactly what 
you told them to.  That actually seems sort of quaint now.
		--J.D. Baldwin

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From: Josh Berkus <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 12 Jun 2007 13:04:13 -0700

All,

> victims", which is what the proposal so far sounds like to me.

First off, I'm not clear on why we're discussing this on -hackers; -www would 
be the appropriate list.  So I'm cross posting; please reply any additional 
messages to -www.

Second, I'm not sure why we care.  I don't believe that e-mail confidentiality 
notices are in fact enforceable, or at least they haven't been in some 
high-profile cases which made the news.  IANAL, of course.

> PostgreSQL.Org usage policies which can be found here (insert link).

This is a good idea anyway.  We should have a list usage policy, and we should 
link to if from the subscribe confirmation and from the web subscription 
page.  In addition to letting people know that e-mail confidentiality footers 
will be ignored, we can tell them how the lists are moderated, how to 
unsubscribe (can't have this in enough places), not to use HTML mail, etc.

So, who wants to write it?

The only additional idea I have is that we ought to simply strip away any 
e-mail footer over 4 lines from the archives.   Not only would this purge the 
confidentiality footers, it would save us some space in general.

-- 
Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL @ Sun
San Francisco

---

From: Dave Page <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 12 Jun 2007 21:17:55 +0100

> confidentiality footers, it would save us some space in general.

The effort it would take to write some code to extract the messages from
the archive mboxes, break up the messages into their component parts,
strip excess sig lines, reconstruct the messages, reconstruct the mboxes
and then regenerate the archives would probably equate in dollar value
to the disk space required for another 40 or 50 years worth of archives.

I vote 'lets not bother'

:-)

/D

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From: Tom Lane <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 12 Jun 2007 16:29:55 -0400

> to the disk space required for another 40 or 50 years worth of archives.

A more serious objection is that any automated tool would probably get it
wrong sometimes, and strip important text.

> I vote 'lets not bother'

Right.  I agree with Josh's idea about mentioning list policies in the
subscription confirmation message, though.

			regards, tom lane

---

From: "Andrew Hammond" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 12 Jun 2007 15:08:39 -0700

> subscription confirmation message, though.

Why? If the legal mumbo-jumbo has already got some precedence as being
un-enforcable (even if it's only in a handful of jurisdictions), why
give it even a patina of credibility by addressing it in a policy?
Saying that it's not applicable here implies that is is applicable
elsewhere. To quote Ghandi "first they laugh at you, then they ignore
you, then they fight you, then you win." I say we stick with the
laughing. To that end, I propose should have a policy about being
pelted with scathing sarcasm when the signal to boilerplate ratio
drops below 10:1.

Andrew

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From: "Joshua D. Drake" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 12 Jun 2007 15:14:44 -0700

Andrew Hammond wrote:
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We are addressing the "whole" using postgresql.org mailing lists issue. 
The legality issue is only part of it.

It is always a good idea to document against stuff like this, just in case.

Joshua D. Drake

> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
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> TIP 4: Have you searched our list archives?
> 
>               http://archives.postgresql.org
> 

-- 

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---

From: Tom Lane <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 12 Jun 2007 18:35:59 -0400

> It is always a good idea to document against stuff like this, just in case.

If push came to shove, which I sure hope it never does, being able to
say "you agreed to these terms of use of the mailing lists" would be
an excellent defense.  They'd have to argue "that's not binding because
we didn't legally agree", whereupon we could reply "sure, and your
disclaimer is equally not binding because we didn't agree to it".
Whereupon they slink away quietly.  Without such a reply they might
manage to get a court to listen for awhile before throwing them out.

If there's anything I've learned about matters legalistic, it's that
it's always better to have more than one line of defense.

			regards, tom lane

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From: Jeff MacDonald <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 13 Jun 2007 10:28:58 -0400

> All,
[...snipped...]
> This is a good idea anyway.  We should have a list usage policy, and we
> should link to if from the subscribe confirmation and from the web
> subscription page.  In addition to letting people know that e-mail
> confidentiality footers will be ignored, we can tell them how the lists are
> moderated, how to unsubscribe (can't have this in enough places), not to
> use HTML mail, etc.
>

ok.. of course as an "experienced user" I agree that HTML on the mailing list 
postings should be banned. kmail has a setting for this, but I doubt that the 
common Windows Email Client does. my suggestion is to link to reasons *why* 
HTML in email is bad (and no, "because spam is sent using html" is not a good 
enough reason:)), and perhaps a link to a document that talks about how to 
turn it off with yahoo, gmail, OE, etc would help. actually.. is HTML in 
email all that bad if there is a reasonable text/plain version attached? 
granted it chews bandwidth and storage space in the archives.. so.. hmm. :)

regards,
-- 
Jeff MacDonald, 
Zoid Technologies <http://zoidtechnologies.com/>

---

From: Dave Page <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 13 Jun 2007 15:54:21 +0100

Jeff MacDonald wrote:
> but I doubt that the 
> common Windows Email Client does. 

I've never come across a Microsoft MUA that didn't have a plain text option.

/D

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From: "Joshua D. Drake" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 13 Jun 2007 08:07:44 -0700

Dave Page wrote:
> Jeff MacDonald wrote:
>> but I doubt that the common Windows Email Client does. 
> 

Sure, but they also all send html by default.

Joshua D. Drake

> TIP 7: You can help support the PostgreSQL project by donating at
> 
>                http://www.postgresql.org/about/donate
> 

--

---

From: Andrew Sullivan <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 13 Jun 2007 14:31:29 -0400

On Tue, Jun 12, 2007 at 01:04:13PM -0700, Josh Berkus wrote:
> 
> This is a good idea anyway.  We should have a list usage policy,
> and we should link to if from the subscribe confirmation and from
> the web subscription page.  In addition to letting people know that
> e-mail confidentiality footers will be ignored, we can tell them
> how the lists are moderated, how to unsubscribe (can't have this in
> enough places), not to use HTML mail, etc.
> 

If there are no other volunteers (I may have overlooked them), I'm
willing to.  I'm all for a note in the subscription &c. that says we
don't approve of, and will not be bound by, these footers.  I just
don't think we should ignore the poor sods on whom these things have
been inflicted.

> The only additional idea I have is that we ought to simply strip
> away any e-mail footer over 4 lines from the archives.  Not only
> would this purge the confidentiality footers, it would save us some
> space in general.

I will support this as soon as you can guarantee that the program to
do this cannot, in any possible world, ever have any bugs ;-)

A
-- 
Andrew Sullivan  | [email-masked]
Everything that happens in the world happens at some place.
		--Jane Jacobs

---

From: Magnus Hagander <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 13 Jun 2007 20:44:09 +0200

> Sure, but they also all send html by default.

Nope. At least OL in a corp environment will default to RTF format,
which the server turns into plaintext when it goes on the internet.
Again, this is with the default config. A lot of people change it, of
course. (actually, it may have changed in the latest versions of OL, but
it was like this not long ago)

//Magnus

---

From: Bruce Momjian <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 13 Jun 2007 17:42:33 -0400 (EDT)

> I've never come across a Microsoft MUA that didn't have a plain text option.

I get hotmail email that has no text if the user used colors in the
email.

---

From: Magnus Hagander <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2007 13:12:40 +0200

> I get hotmail email that has no text if the user used colors in the

It has the *option*. Doesn't mean it's used.

But you get this now? Most of the time, I get a combined one with one
plaintext and one html part, IIRC... But it could be a user setting or
somethign.

//Magnus

---

From: Andrew Sullivan <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2007 09:40:07 -0400

> plaintext and one html part, IIRC... But it could be a user setting or

Or maybe an old server.  The only _proper_ way to send messages that
are supposed to be 2822 messages is to include at least one RFC822
message body.  This may change when EAI is adopted, but until that
day, MIME is your friend and not sending an RFC822 message body is a
way of telling parts of the Internet that you don't want to talk to
them.

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan  | [email-masked]
In the future this spectacle of the middle classes shocking the avant-
garde will probably become the textbook definition of Postmodernism. 
                --Brad Holland