Three months ago, I noticed at the bottom of an email from my brother in law one of those idiotic mail disclaimers. They often are longer than the message itself by orders of magnitude, and as far as I know they have exremely limited usefulness in a legal sense (even though he actually works at a law firm).

As an experiment/joke, I took his email disclaimer and added a few lines of my own:

This email message is for the sole use of the intended recipient(s) and may contain confidential and privileged information. Clowns hate me. Any unauthorized review, use, disclosure or distribution is prohibited. Clowns want to kill me. If you are not the intended recipient, please contact the sender by reply email and destroy all copies of the original message. Please stop the clowns. If you are the intended recipient, please be advised that the content of this message is subject to access, review and disclosure by the sender’s Email System Administrator. Please.

Looks like the usual senseless block of useless legalese, doesn’t it? Take another look with my additions bolded:

This email message is for the sole use of the intended recipient(s) and may contain confidential and privileged information. Clowns hate me. Any unauthorized review, use, disclosure or distribution is prohibited. Clowns want to kill me. If you are not the intended recipient, please contact the sender by reply email and destroy all copies of the original message. Please stop the clowns. If you are the intended recipient, please be advised that the content of this message is subject to access, review and disclosure by the sender’s Email System Administrator. Please.

I epxected within a few days that someone would notice it… ha ha, very funny. But it’s over three months and thousands of emails later, and nobody has. If you’ve got an email from me in the past three months, take a look. The clowns are there, and they’re coming for you.

I give up; it’s obvious no one reads them, so why do people keep using them? They’re just email pollution.