Opinion
13th February 2025
An e-mail suffix
Those of us who send e-mails seem to fall into two camps. There are those who just sign off with a name, nickname, or diminutive, and those who add long statements about confidentiality and try to bind the recipient into some sort of duty of care, usually to delete the message and not mention its contents to anyone if received in error.
The latter is used on corporate e-mails in particular and seems to be lawyers’ efforts to mitigate damage when, as we have probably all done from time to time, senders accidentally send a message to the wrong person or disclose information they should not have mentioned. I’m not sure how effective that is, given that I doubt receiving an unsolicited message creates a binding contract to abide by conditions. I have always understood messages belong to the people who receive them and are theirs to dispose of as they wish, but I am no lawyer and I could be wrong.
There has been a recent trend in e-mail signatures to attempt to bind recipients in another way, which threatens the identity of recipients and tries to control how they express their view of the world by constraining permissible language when referring to the sender. I refer, of course, to the attachment of third-person pronouns to signatures. I find this threatening when I receive it and have wondered how I should draw attention to that threat to recipients’ identity and autonomy without starting an unseemly row.
One way I have been considering for some time is to attach some sort of statement to my own e-mails which highlights the misguided nature of this new trend, but in a manner which does not look argumentative or silly, or is not likely to be ambiguous or incomprehensible to the reader. Eventually, last night I came up with the idea, “I respect your right to express who you are by describing me as you see me” which sums up what I’m trying to say in a way which shows I am not dictating to others what their world-view should be. This morning I wasn’t so sure. Might a lawyer argue I had given recipients license to defame me and therefore could have no defence to my reputation?
What should I add then without making the statement as long as those legal arguments I’ve already mentioned or detract from the liberating tone I want to achieve? “Excepting defamation” might fit the need, but sounds too official or even officious, and should it go on the beginning or the end? How about “without defaming me” then? Possibly, but would that confuse or devalue the message too much? Would “so long as it is not defamatory” look better or worse? I don’t know. I feel sure this is the approach to take to expose the folly and argue for tolerance, but no one wants to go too far and license excess. This site is about truth as well as tolerance.
I think I’m nearly there, but I need to give it a little more thought.