Graham Miln at Dssw has an interesting article talking about adding legally required information to emails using headers instead of using signature blocks. He also talks about a defined microformat for the data.
This is interesting to me, because I’m already doing something similar with some emails sent by the new MalcolmHardie Solutions order processing system. Most orders don’t involve sending any emails at all, the work is done entirely by swreg, who have their own arrangements. However educational orders go through an approval process which involves sending an email. Including all of the legally required information in the body is clunky and inefficient, because most of the time it won’t actually be used; but it has to be present. It appears that we both developed the idea in parallel because I did the coding on this last week and I only read the article today.
The dssw headers aren’t the same of course. More options are specified and it seems more optimized for automated processing. My headers are perhaps slightly more optimized for humans. The strings are the same as the strings that were formerly in the email signatures.
MalcolmHardie Solutions headers:
X-CompanyInfo: MalcolmHardie Solutions Ltd, Registered in Scotland Number SC283129
X-CompanyRegisteredAddress: Office 22, 196 Rose Street, Edinburgh EH2 4AT
Dssw headers:
X-Company-Address: Dragon Systems Software Ltd (DssW), 3rd Floor Suite, ***** Hereford, ******** United Kingdom
X-Company-Registration: EnglishWelsh-3397***
X-Company-Directors: G.C.***, E.A.*****
X-Company-Secretary: J.E.*****
X-Company-About: http://www.dssw.co.uk/about/
(I have replaced some data with stars to slightly reduce the amount of personal data)
I will have to see how to reconcile the two formats, but I think most likely I will use a combination of the two.
I particularly like the X-Company-About header which I think is useful and very functional. The machine parse-able X-Company-Registration header is also a good idea, although I like having the complete human readable string as well (X-CompanyInfo) at the cost of an additional line. It might be worthwhile having both a registered address and a company contact address as many smaller businesses do this. Another heading that might be useful would be X-Company-VatRegistrationNumber which is required if you have one.
Possibly a X-Company-Logo header could indicate a path to a small copy of the company logo which could then be displayed next to the email address in suitable clients.
Note that MalcolmHardie Solutions doesn’t add the names of the directors as a policy decision. My understanding, based on information from Companies House, is that displaying this information is optional, so we don’t.
While the details may differ I definitely think this is the way to go on legal information in headers. Structured data should be stored in a structured format and not appended randomly to unstructured data.
Hopefully we can work towards some kind of common standard, which could then be included in email programs and other tools. Think how much easier it would be to comply with the law if it was a simple preference in your email program and the program asked for the details when you install and displayed the information in the headers section when viewing emails.