Email signature generator › Confidentiality notice
The confidentiality notice, honestly
Most corporate signatures carry a paragraph asserting that if you received this message in error you must delete it. It is worth being clear about what that paragraph can and cannot accomplish.
Your details
Layout
Logo or photo — optional
Drop an image here or click to choose
PNG or JPG, under 2 MB
or use a hosted image
Preview
Nothing is uploaded and nothing is stored. The image you drop stays in this browser.
What it cannot do
A notice at the bottom of a message cannot create a contract with someone who never agreed to one. A person who receives your email by mistake has not accepted any terms, and a footer asserting obligations does not by itself make them binding. Courts in several jurisdictions have declined to treat such footers as imposing duties on unintended recipients.
It also cannot make a message confidential that would not otherwise be. Legal privilege, for instance, attaches to the nature of the communication and the relationship, not to a sentence claiming it exists.
What it can do
It can evidence intent. If a dispute later turns on whether information was treated as confidential, a consistent notice is some evidence that the sender regarded it that way — weak evidence on its own, more useful alongside actual practice.
It can satisfy a specific regulatory requirement. Some regulated professions and some jurisdictions require particular wording on particular kinds of correspondence. Where such a rule applies, the notice is not optional and its wording is not yours to shorten.
It can be a practical instruction. "If you received this in error, please tell us and delete it" is a reasonable request that many recipients will follow because it is reasonable, not because it is binding.
The length problem
Disclaimers grow by accretion. A clause is added after each incident, nobody is authorised to remove anything, and after some years the footer is longer than most of the messages it is attached to.
The cost is real: it pushes the contact details out of view, it repeats on every message in a thread, and it contributes to the size at which Gmail truncates a conversation. A footer of 2 KB repeated over a fifty-message thread is 100 KB of the 102 KB budget.
Deciding what yours needs to say
This is a question for whoever advises your organisation on legal matters, and the useful thing to bring them is a specific question rather than a request to review the footer. Which of these clauses is required by a rule that applies to us, and which is here because it was added once. That distinction usually removes most of the length.
Keeping it light when it must stay
Where a long notice is genuinely required, make it text only — no images, no tables, no styling beyond a smaller font size and a lighter grey. A legally complete notice with no images can be under 1 KB. Put it last, below the contact details, so that the part readers use is above the part the lawyers require.
If it is applied by a server rule rather than by each user's signature, it can also be suppressed on replies within a thread, which removes the repetition without removing the notice.
Measuring what yours costs
Paste your current notice into any character counter. A typical corporate confidentiality paragraph runs 900 to 1,400 characters, which is roughly 1 to 1.4 KB of every message. On a thread of thirty messages that is 30 to 42 KB — between a third and 40% of the 102 KB at which Gmail truncates.
That number is worth having before the conversation about shortening it, because it turns an aesthetic preference into an operational one.
Styling it so it does not dominate
11 or 12 pixels, a grey around #999, and a
line-height of about 1.4. Separated from the contact details by a
1-pixel rule or 12 pixels of space, so it reads as a distinct block rather than
as the continuation of your details. No bold, no capitals, no coloured warning
text — emphasis on a notice nobody reads only draws the eye away from the part
that is useful.
Server-applied versus per-user
If the notice is required on every message, applying it with a server rule is more reliable than trusting every employee's signature settings, and it lets you change the wording in one place. It also lets you suppress it on replies within a thread, which removes the repetition without removing the notice.
Frequently asked questions
Is a confidentiality notice legally binding?
It generally cannot impose obligations on a recipient who never agreed to them. It may evidence that the sender treated the information as confidential.
Do I have to have one?
Only where a specific rule applies to your profession or jurisdiction. Outside those cases it is a convention, not a requirement. Ask whoever advises you on legal matters.
How long should it be?
As long as any applicable rule requires and no longer. Most grew by accretion and could be a third of their length.
Can I leave it off replies?
If it is applied by a server rule, yes — an exception can skip messages that already contain it. Whether you should depends on the requirement it satisfies.