My stock reply to such a request would be along the lines of:
"How would you feel if Royal Mail (U.S Postal Service/Bundespost etc) opened
up your snail mail and added a piece of card saying 'The opinions expressed
in this mail are those of the author and nothing to do with Royal Mail'?"
After all, that's what it would amount to if an MTA were to add a
disclaimer. The same applies to advertisements. Such things should be
under the control of the originator of the message, _not_ the carrier.
Paul Walsh
Senior Systems Programmer, Information Services,
University of Central England, BIRMINGHAM B42 2SU, UK
Tel: +44 (0)121 331 5708 Fax: +44 (0)121 356 2875
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Nigel Metheringham [mailto:Nigel.Metheringham@VData.co.uk]
> Sent: 12 June 2000 17:21
> To: Marsh, Ian
> Cc: 'exim-users@???'
> Subject: Re: [Exim] Adding a disclaimer to out going emails
>
>
>
> Ian.Marsh@??? said:
> > The server that exim run on is a central hub with no local users,
> > there are various lookups that determine if the email
> passing through
> > is inbound or not. Anything going out is passed to a single
> router so
> > I guess that something in there (or a custom transport used only by
> > that router) would be the place to put it but I'm not sure
> exactly how
> > to do it. Has anyone done this? Any suggestions would be welcome.
>
> This keeps coming up (Philip - can something be added to the FAQ?)
>
> The short answer is that it can be done in theory and the place to do
> that would be in a transport filter.
>
> My standard answer follows:-
> Adding footers to mail in the MTA is wrong because:-
> 1. It breaks digital signatures. As these became legally binding
> in the last few weeks thats particularly bad timing
>
> 2. It breaks MIME encoding
>
> 3. It is illegal under German and Dutch law to change the body of
> a mail message in transit. It might potentially be illegal in
> the UK under European law.
>
> 4. Since the delivered message body was produced by the MTA (not the
> originator since you modified it), the MTA operator could
> potentially be sued for any content.
> [Its interesting that adding a disclaimer of liability *could*
> be making you liable for the message :-) ]
>
> 5. Some mail clients (old versions of MS outlook) crash if
> the message
> body of an incoming MIME message has been tampered with.
>
> 6. It is not the job of an MTA to modify content.
>
>
> Nigel.
> --
> [ - Opinions expressed are personal and may not be shared by VData - ]
> [ Nigel Metheringham Nigel.Metheringham@??? ]
> [ Phone: +44 1423 850000 Fax +44 1423 858866 ]
>
>
>
> --
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