SAP carbon and stuff

Question

Dear sirs,
please comment on the idea:
I have heard that the costs of the transfer of the email footers (like green wannabe stuff like "please consider the enivronment before printing this em-ail" etc.) are pretty high and in most of the cases not including the footer will help much more than adding the footer with this Message (big M).
I use the follow thread function here on SDN and find most of the email I got useless.
Please consider how much "energy"/ costs does it take to transfer:
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Mandatory Disclosure Statements: http://www.sap.com/company/legal/impressum.epx
This e-mail may contain trade secrets or privileged, undisclosed, or otherwise confidential information. If you have received this e-mail in error, you are hereby notified that any review, copying, or distribution of it is strictly prohibited. Please inform us immediately and destroy the original transmittal. Thank you for your cooperation.
when this email is send like million times every day.
I am no green man but find that a little stupid. What do you think?
Regards Otto

Answer 1

Hi Otto,
of course I do support your challenge.
Actually, if you look at this paragraph
This e-mail may contain trade secrets or privileged, undisclosed, or otherwise confidential information. If you have received this e-mail in error, you are hereby notified that any review, copying, or distribution of it is strictly prohibited. Please inform us immediately and destroy the original transmittal. Thank you for your cooperation.
although it is probably based on some legal recommendation, I doubt that it would hold in any legal challenge, because
it is an unsolicited email from my point of view
the footer is usually at the end of the email but no one can force me to read any email until the very end
so, I already know "the secret" but cannot be required to read the email till the end
therefore I do not have to know that it is not intended for me to read and to pass on
several corporate policies require me not to delete email and even if I do they are probably kept somwhere for audit reasons and stuff
it would be funny if I really were legally required to immediately inform the sender, because this would be a welcome opportunity for mail address collecors to verify the activity of arbitrary email addresses
e tc., etc...
Actually, there is a simple solution to heavily reduce unauthorized and unintentional reading of email, the sender simply has to digitally sign and encrypt the message so that only the intended user can read it. The probability that someone sends a confidential email erroneously to otto.bold at xy.com instead of otto.gold at xy.com is very low because he will probably not have the public key of otto bold at hand ...
my 2 cents, anton
ps: kishan, your welcome to share our brainstorming from back than...