[woodall]

The comments for that article are worth a read:

     Zouf wrote:

     While you are mostly correct, there is one good legal use of an email footer:
     to declare the data above it as confidential, and therefore comply with
     confidentiality agreements that protect only data that has been explicitly
     declared as confidential.

I found this one particularly funny:

     stewsnooze wrote:

     Practice what you preach.......

     This e-mail may contain confidential material. If you are not an intended
     recipient, please notify the sender and delete all copies. It may also contain
     personal views which are not the views of The Economist Group. We may
     monitor e-mail to and from our network...

http://www.economist.com/comment/886653#comment-886653

I wouldn't start leaving them out just yet.

[cschmidt]

Well, they do mention in the article that they do it themselves....

> Many firms—The Economist included—automatically append these sorts of disclaimers to every message sent from their e-mail servers, no matter how brief and trivial the message itself might be.