What should an email disclaimer say?

What should an email disclaimer say? First, whatever the law or your regulator requires, such as a UK company's registered details. After that, as little as possible: a short, plain notice about confidentiality is enough for most organisations. A long block of legal-sounding text adds weight to every email without adding much protection, and the parts that are actually required get lost in it.

Two kinds of text in one footer

Most email footers mix two quite different things:

Treat them separately. The required part is covered in our guide to UK email footer legal requirements. The rest of this post is about the optional part.

What a notice at the foot of an email can and cannot do

A disclaimer is read, if at all, after the message, by someone who has not agreed to anything. So treat it as a request and a statement of your position, not as a contract. Your legal adviser can tell you how much weight a particular notice carries in your situation.

What a short notice does well:

• Tells an accidental recipient what you expect. "If you are not the intended recipient, please tell the sender and delete it" is a clear request most people will follow.
• Signals that the content is confidential, which can matter when you later need to show that you treated it that way.
• Points to your privacy notice, which is a helpful link for anyone wondering how you handle their details.

What it cannot do is undo a mistake. A notice does not recall an email sent to the wrong person; the only real fix for that is care before sending.

A short notice that does the job

This email and any attachments are confidential and intended only for the named recipient. If you have received it in error, please tell the sender and delete it.

Two sentences. Add a link to your privacy notice if you like. Anything beyond that should earn its place.

Where it goes, and on which emails

• At the bottom, after the signature. A notice above the message pushes the content down on every phone screen.
• Required disclosures first. If the footer has both, put the registered details or the regulator's wording before the confidentiality notice, so the part that must be there is the part people see.
• Small, but readable. Muted, smaller text is fine. Text so pale it fails a contrast check is not.
• Mostly on external email. A confidentiality notice on a message between two colleagues tells nobody anything. Many organisations keep it off internal mail, while keeping any required disclosure on everything external.

Disclaimers in Footer365

Footer365's editor has a Disclaimer element with a list of ready-written notices: confidentiality, data protection, company registration and others. Pick one, then adjust the wording for that template in the Content box, where Insert field adds a company detail such as the company name or address. Reset to default puts the original wording back. The wording is starter text, not legal advice, so have it approved before use. Our guide to disclaimers covers each step.

Three details worth knowing:

• When you add a disclaimer, its wording is copied into your template. Later changes to Footer365's list never alter your templates, so your footer only changes when you change it.
• A disclaimer that uses a company detail is left out for anyone with no value for that detail in Microsoft 365, rather than sent with a gap. For required wording, type the details as fixed text instead.
• With two rules, one set to internal recipients and one to external, the notice can go on external mail only. Any email with even one outside recipient counts as external.

Where to go next

Read your current footer and mark each sentence as required or optional. Keep every required line, cut the optional ones down to two sentences, and put the result on every email from one place. The features page shows how Footer365 does that across a whole organisation.