Sunday, July 08, 2007

Enough of confidentiality notice clutter

We are all "disturbed" by the most naive and fancy or just annoying "Confidentiality Notice", DISCLAIMERS, or whatever people/companies add to their email signatures. That's just pollution, since they won't add any good into email messaging but cluttering our everyday mailing life.

I think most of you already know well the problem so I won't go much in deep explaining this problem.

Well I have a proposal to solv..hmm...circumvent this problem: introduce an X-Disclaimer or X-ConfidentialityNotice header whose value would be an URL pointing to website into the message's From: domain.

For example, the new header would appear like this:
  X-ConfidentialityNotice: http://www.iscanet.com/notices/email.xml

or more simply
  X-ConfidentialityNotice: http://www.iscanet.com/notices/email.html

Now for the feature request: it would be a good thing if mail clients recongnized this header and had some GUI binding, so that somewhere in the message view appeared some sort of button or whatever pointing to (guess what) "Confidentiality Notice", that would retrieve the xml, parse and show it, or simply follow the hyperlink showing the clutter :-)

What would we need to implement this magic?
  • In the account settings, add a text box to add the notice's URL
  • Define and share a DTD in the case we would go for XML
  • some "app logic" to parse XML, and check correspondence between From: domain and X-ConfidentialityNotice domain of the URL.
  • In the message view window add a GUI element (text, smallicon, whatever) on the window border, or statusbar or near the subject, or werever you like. This element would fire up the hyperlink or open a dialog with properly parsed xml.
Having this or some sort of this thing implemented would give us some peace of mind and less clutter into our email.

Since I like this idea, I will be mailing Microsoft, Apple and Mozilla guys to hear what they think.

That's my 5cents.

2 comments:

windrago said...

my friend, I think you should go ahead and share this thought because I think it would work. There's only one thing that puzzles me at moment. Security. But I definitely see potential in your idea! Good one.

volpedue said...

Thank you man!

Well yes, thinking about "security" I'd leave space and fantasy to implementation.

I think, since the company who owns the domain most of times decides its own confidentiality notices, the host part of URL should be in same domain as the mail sender.

That would give company the opportunity to put their notes on their web site, or assign a IN A record like notices.domain.com to another party, if they want to outsource this sort of annoying management activity (*lol* outsource the confidentiality notice would be a new business...and I'm sure people would buy it).

hmmm...lemme think :-)