On Mon, 14 Jul 2008 12:25:29 +0100, Ian Rawlings 
wrote in <487b39e7$0$1345$834e42db@reader.greatnowhere.com>:

>Mind you I don't put my company name or personal name in an email
>signature, there was a case in the UK courts some time ago in which it
>was deemed that a statement sent via company email was not
>contractually binding if the sender did not use the company name in
>the email body, including a signature, and that the From: header with
>the company name was not enough to make it contractually binding.
>Putting the company name in a signature was regarded as making the
>email contractually binding.  I prefer to explicitly state what is and
>isn't binding rather than have thunderbird do it for me ;-)

I found an article about a case <http://www.out-law.com/page-6839> which
may be the one you are thinking of. My reading of it is that it is a
personal name that matters, not the company name and it has to have been
put in the message with the intention of giving authenticity as you
would if you were signing a letter. The name in the headers was
considered 'incidental', nothing was said about a name that might have
been added automatically as in the kind of 'signature' we talk about for
email or news postings. We will have to wait for a case where the
question arises to get an answer to that one.

-- 
Owen Rees
[one of] my preferred email address[es] and more stuff can be
found at <http://www.users.waitrose.com/~owenrees/index.html>

On 2008-07-16, Owen Rees  wrote:

> I found an article about a case <http://www.out-law.com/page-6839> which
> may be the one you are thinking of. My reading of it is that it is a
> personal name that matters, not the company name and it has to have been
> put in the message with the intention of giving authenticity as you
> would if you were signing a letter.

That one doesn't ring a bell, and the one I was thinking about did
have some info about the automated signatures.  I think it might have
been on out-law however.  Sorry I can't be arsed to look it up, as I
might well be chasing a memory artifact ;-)

-- 
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