Today I received this email from my friend Josh:
Thanks!
-Josh
***
The information contained in
this message and any attachment(s) may be privileged, confidential, proprietary
or otherwise protected from disclosure and is intended solely for the use of
the individual or entity to whom it is addressed. If you are not the intended recipient, you
are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution, copying or use of
this message and any attachment is strictly prohibited and may be unlawful. If you have received this message in error,
please notify us immediately by replying to this email and permanently delete
the message from your computer.
Nothing contained in this
message and/or any attachment(s) constitutes a solicitation or an offer to buy
or sell any securities.
Those 113 words (720 characters) really annoy me. Ever try to get through an email thread with 10 of those disclaimers in it! Frustrating!
I wonder how much bandwidth this text consumes? 720 characters = 720 bytes (please be right) x 3M bankers and lawyers in the US alone x 50 emails sent per day per banker / lawyer x average of 5 replies per thread (meaning that the text gets copied multiple times into each thread x average of 5 recipients per email thread x 330 email sending days a year = something like 850 terabytes bytes a year in bandwidth consumed on these disclaimers. Say bandwidth costs $.10 a gigabyte, and that's maybe $100,000 incremental dollars spent transmitting this flub. History has shown that my models are always too low, so let's round up to the nearest million and assume that it's $1M spent on this per year across the firms for those 3M bankers and lawyers.
I was expecting it to be a massive number. It's not. Email is cheap. No trees were harmed in the transmission of the disclaimer text. But some developer out there should write a little app that goes in and cleanses out all the standard disclaimer crap from emails, except for the last one at the bottom of the email. That may only save hundreds of thousands of dollars in bandwidth cost per year, but it would save me a ton of time scrolling through endless threads of legal mumbo jumbo. I'd pay $10 for that app. Write it. I'll PayPal you the money!
