If someone sends you an email and it says:

Notice:
This communication is an electronic communication within the meaning
of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, 18 U.S.C. sec. 2510. Its
disclosure is strictly limited to the recipient(s) intended by the
sender of this message. This transmission and any attachments may
contain proprietary, confidential, attorney-client privileged
information and/or attorney work product. If you are not the intended
recipient, any disclosure, copying, distribution, reliance on, or use
of any of the information contained herein is STRICTLY PROHIBITED.
Please destroy the original transmission and its attachments without
reading or saving in any matter and confirm by return email.

Are you breaking any law by disclosing the email to someone else? If you don't have any prior agreement, like an NDA or attorney/client relationship?

If you get an e-mail by accident, what happens if you do one of the things that is STRICTLY PROHIBITED?

The ECPA mostly covers illegal tapping/sniffing. If you get the message accidentally, but it's the fault of the original sender (ie: he got the email address wrong), you're still the intended recipient - in other words, you got it legit, it's not your fault Joe can't spell. Once you get the message, you can do whatever you want with it - you can forward it, delete it, print it, whatever, you are the intended recipient. Whatever privacy concerns you run into afterwards is all civil not criminal - in other words, you may get canned or sued for leaking company info, but you can't get sent to jail.

I guessed that was probably the case. Unless you're in their company or in their school then they can't STRICTLY PROHIBIT you from doing too much.

Email is not like the normal mail. It's faster, but less protected. Mail fraud and mail tampering carries with it stiff federal jail time under US Law.

I work for the post office, so I hear it all the time. For tampering with each piece of mail, it's *supposed* to be $5,000 fine and 6 months jail time(per piece).

For mail fraud, it's a lot higher: 20 years and/or 30 years and/or up to 1 million dollar fine.

The reason I asked is someone sent email to a company asking about a ingredient that was used in their product. She got a response with that nonsense on the bottom and then she felt compelled to have to go back and ask permission to post the response she got from the company to a public message forum.

I thought it was unnecessary since she isn't working for the company, didn't sign an NDA. But I didn't want to say anything until I knew for sure.

So it wouldn't be eavesdropping or tampering to post the email somewhere public it's just meant for wire-tapping. Gotcha.

I know a lot of companies have that as the default signature on the bottom of every email they send out.

It's sort of like the warnings they put all over everything that say "don't eat poison" or "don't stick sharp objects in your eye". I've always ignored them.

I'm assuming that this ingredient is something that can harm some people with certain sensitivities or allergies? In which case, I would say the woman could paraphrase without posting the actual email, and not voilate the STRICT prohibitions (which everyone ignores anyway).

If someone sends you an email and it says:


Are you breaking any law by disclosing the email to someone else? If you don't have any prior agreement, like an NDA or attorney/client relationship?

If you are the recipient, then the attorney-client priviledge is there to protect yourself. You can break it at any time you wish, so far as I know. However, my understanding is that once you've broken it with someone you do not have a priviledge with (generally speaking Doctors, Clergy, and Spouses), your priviledge is less binding.

Ask Scir =P

IF it has your email address, I would assume that it was intended for you... If I got mail with my name on it... I would assume that it was for me...

That warning is there primarily to protect the sender, and to intimidate the accidental recipient from sharing any protected information contained in the email. It's also the basis for claiming inadvertant disclosure (rather than an intended waiver) in case something in the email is actually supposed to be protected by a privilege.