Is this sentence correct "Any and all persons can do this."?

Solution 1:

There are contexts in which the phrase any and all may serve a purpose, but this is not one of them; in fact, in this case, the sentence, interpreted literally, means something that was unlikely to have been intended.

Consider first a slightly different case. Suppose that the website said 'Any and all students of this university can have this account.' What would that mean? The word any would in that case tell us that there are no special requirements for having the account, other than being a student of this university. Would the word all add anything to that? Yes, it would. It would tell us that the capacity of whatever the accounts are for is such that it can accommodate all the students of the university. If the capacity were limited (e.g. the server would crash if every student really opened the account), it would be true that any student can have the account, but false that all students can have it.

In this case, however, the sentence is not about some relatively limited set, as the students of a particular university, but 'persons', without any qualification. What the operators of the website probably wanted to say is that there are no special requirements for opening the account. That could have been adequately expressed by their saying 'Any person can have this account'. They have instead said 'any and all', perhaps because they vaguely remembered having seen that phrase in some legal document and because it sounded more impressive to them. If they thought about the matter more carefully, however, they would have realised that saying that all persons can have the account means that whatever the accounts are for has sufficient capacity to accommodate all human beings currently in existence. It is unlikely that they actually intended that.