Email Footer Legal Requirements
June 10th, 2008 Posted in Email LawWritten by Ian Pollard
Often neglected, or a grudging afterthought, companies should be aware of their legal obligations with regards to the the footers they put on their commercial emails.
The Mandatory Stuff
If your business is a Limited Company or a Limited Liability Partnership (LLP), the UK Companies Act 1985 requires all your emails to include the following details, which must be in legible characters:
- Company registration number
- Your place of registration (e.g. Scotland or England & Wales)
- Your registered office address
These duties were clarified on 1 January 2007, as a result of an amendment that was made to the Companies Act to comply with a European Directive. Be aware that failure to comply with these requirements puts your company at risk of a fine. These details are not required of Sole Traders or Standard Partnerships.
If you’re a US company sending commercial email, the CAN-SPAM Act requires that you include the “valid physical postal address” of your business in your email footers.
The Optional Stuff - Confidentiality Notices and Disclaimers
Organisations sometimes add a confidentiality notice to every outgoing email. If the disclosure of the content of an email becomes the subject of a dispute, it can be argued before a court that the recipient should have known to not disclose the information.
However, there is no legal authority for this, and there is always a risk that a court might reject the notice as ineffective, particularly where the notice is added automatically to every outgoing email. Where such notices are used they have a better prospect of standing up in court if they appear above the body of a message.
Disclaimers are often added to all outgoing emails but they should be written with care. What you attempt to disclaim will depend on the nature of your business, and if your disclaimer is too wide it will fall down in court.
Email monitoring
If your organisation monitors some email traffic data, your outgoing emails should say: “[Organisation Name] may monitor email traffic data”.
If your organisation also monitors the content of email, you should say: “[Organisation name] may monitor email traffic data and also the content of email for the purposes of [give reason e.g. security and staff training]“.
What are the laws governing email?
The monitoring of business email is primarily governed by the Telecommunications (Lawful Business Practice) Regulations 2000 but it is also affected by other laws including EU rules and, in the UK, the Human Rights Act 1998 and the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000. In the US, it is governed by the Federal Trade Commission and the CAN-SPAM Act.
Marketers in the UK should also make sure they have read understood the following documents provided by the Information Commissioner’s Office:
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