Using message disclaimers
in Domino
Since the introduction of EU regulations on disclaiming email, the use
of message disclaimers in Domino has become more prevalent in the EMEA
region. Message disclaimers are notices (usually short text blocks) that
are added to email messages. They are often used by organizations in an
attempt to protect the organization's legal interests.This article will
try to address issues you may have regarding the setup and use of message
disclaimers in Domino.
As it is not a requirement to disclaim messages to internal users in an
organization, Domino is designed to only disclaim messages that are destined
for Internet addresses through SMTP. The messages can be disclaimed either
by the Domino server itself or by the Notes client. Which one to use becomes
a matter of performance capability over storage capacity:
- When the server disclaims a message,
the message has to be rewritten by the server to append the disclaimer
text. This process can also involve "best match" or "unicode"
selection for multilingual messages.
This is a performance consideration.
- When the client disclaims a message,
the disclaimer is added at Send time. If the Notes user has set the option
to save sent mail, each disclaimed message will have a copy of the disclaimer
in the mail file.
This is a storage consideration.
Setting up message disclaimers
To use disclaimers in a Notes/Domino environment, you must have a Mail
Policy Settings document which is associated with a specific policy, organizational
or explicit.
Figure 1: Message Disclaimer settings in the Mail Settings policy document
- Field 1: Only
enable this setting if you wish for the client to add disclaimers.
- Field 2: This
is the disclaimer text. The field can be plain text or HTML as identified
in Field 3. HTML text should be entered as inline HTML. You should not
code HTML, HEAD or BODY tags.
- Field 3: Specifies
the format of the text; HTML or Plain Text.
- Field 4: Will
the disclaimer text go at the bottom (append) or the top (prepend) of the
message.
- Field 5: When
the disclaimer process encounters a multilingual Internet message, what
character set should be used. Best Match or Unicode.
You can now set up or modify a policy to include the Mail Settings defined
above. The policy can be organizational or explicit. Organizational policies
can be defined down to the organizational unit, so it is possible to have
separate disclaimers defined for different divisions.
Enabling message disclaimers on the client
To enable the Notes client to add disclaimers, modify Field 1 in Figure
1 above and select Enabled. To enable this setting immediately, issue "Tell
AdminP Process Mailpolicy" on all mail servers. This will update the
policy in the affected users' mail files. The Notes client should be logged
out and logged back in to refresh the client settings.
Enabling message disclaimers on the server
Disclaimers will only be added by the outbound Domino SMTP server. To enable
the Domino SMTP server to add disclaimers, modify the Configuration Settings
document as shown:
Figure 2: Configuration Settings document
If you wish to enable disclaimers for S/MIME signed or encrypted messages,
you should be aware that it may prevent recipients from validating the
signature or decrypting the message.
Using HTML in message disclaimers
HTML, HEAD and BODY tags should never be used within the HTML content for
message disclaimers. Using these tags can cause the disclaimer to be treated
as a complete message. See
TN
- 1270433
for further details.
Currently, it is not possible to add images to a disclaimer, however, the
HTML code can be used to point to an image that is available on the Internet.
When using non-ASCII characters in a disclaimer, it may be that recipients
will see the characters replaced with &#nn;. This is a result of a
rendering issue on the recipient's mail client. To avoid these issues,
it is best to use the HTML character entity. For example, for the character
é, enter é Using the HTML character entity will also avoid multilingual
messages being generated by the disclaimer process, since the encoding
only uses ASCII characters. A HTML character entity reference is available
on Wikipedia.