Stop the Signature File Insanity

http://gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/14/stop-signature-file-insanity/

by illdave • 16 years ago

73 67 16 years ago

gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com

thristian• 16 years ago

Back in the day on Usenet, civilised people never used a .signature longer than 4 lines, and often two of those were some form of ASCII-art divider. It's good to see that etiquette lives on, at least somewhere.

DLWormwood2• 16 years ago

Yes, but when I read that article, I thought, “That .sig is nothing." Some of the stuff I’ve seen and heard about during my USENET days could bring you to tears. (Like the “Kibo Warlord” .sig mentioned here, for example.)

mayank• 16 years ago

I had to google for that: http://www.birdhouse.org/etc/kibosig.txt

pbhjpbhj4• 16 years ago

Name, address and contact details should be in an address file attached to the mail, no?

liedra4• 16 years ago

No, please no. Then it registers as an attachment and then I can't tell which email you sent me has that very important attachment at a quick glance. Keep it short, sweet, and in 4 lines please.

jcromartie• 16 years ago

Our recent company-mandated sig includes 5 attachments.

pbhjpbhj4• 16 years ago

Again with the downvotes, did I detract from the conversation? If you disagree say so (and preferably why) or upvote such a disagreement.

>I can't tell which email you sent me has that very important attachment

If it's from me then the subject will say "$important-attachment-subject" and the priority will he set to high (but not highest unless you're going to lose money or there is a risk of injury to persons or properties by a delayed response).

Seriously I'd have thought that people would like a vcard that can save them 10 mins inputting data and instead be imported into an address-book with a simple click.

Admittedly I hadn't realised that it got labelled as an attachment (but it seems obvious it should now). But then ...

Oi, I just tested with Thunderbird and vcards (and signature images) are not labelled as attachments. So, are you sure it does in your MUA?

1tw• 16 years ago

I wonder what the author would think of Kibo and his sig:

http://www.birdhouse.org/etc/kibosig.txt

illdave• 16 years ago

That's just extraordinary.

JeffJenkins• 16 years ago

It's like the Time Cube of email signatures

khafra• 16 years ago

The author would probably say "once you have a minor religion following you, you can do whatever you want in your sig, too."

auxbuss• 16 years ago

Why not use one of the web services that puts everything in one place? Then just add the url to your sig.

I happen to use this one, for example: http://myonepage.com

gaius2• 16 years ago

Even worse are the fancy graphical "please think of the environment before printing" logos - a few billion of them is some real watts of power & cooling in the datacentre...

IgorPartola3• 16 years ago

At one point I did a back of the envelope calculation and it came out that 25 e-mails are roughly equivalent to 1 sheet of printed paper. My context was whether to send out a mass e-mail or to put up a few posters around the place. I guess a few posters would be better for the environment in some cases.

davnola3• 16 years ago

I'd love to see how you come up with that number.

eru5• 16 years ago

Also people pay more attention to posters. At least at our office.

hvs• 16 years ago

Ironically, I once printed an email with one of those on it (I actually needed to) and that stupid graphic logo is what caused it to print on two pages (otherwise it would only have been one page).

pornel2• 16 years ago

I don't mind as long as it's preceded by:

  "-- \n"

My e-mail client will then de-emphasise it and automatically remove when replying.

http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3676#section-4.3

eru5• 16 years ago

Yes. But the guy is talking about `bold' in emails.. He's at a completely different level.

solutionyogi• 16 years ago

I didn't know this, thank you for this very useful information.

If you have a signature set up in Gmail, whenever you compose a new email, Gmail will insert "-- \n" in the textarea just before the signature. It used to annoy me to no end as I could not find the '--' in my original signature. Now I know better. Thank you for helping out a geek with an OCD.

epochwolf2• 16 years ago

I'm guilty of this... This the signature I'm using.

    Thanks,
    ---
    Firstname Lastname
    My enterprisey title. 
    Name of the Company I Work For. 
    555 Some Rd. | City and, ST ZZZIP-CODE
    Work Phone: 555-555-5555
    Cell Phone: 555-555-5555
    Email: flastname@company.com

I wish I could reduce the length of my signature but at least it's on the small side compared to the majority of the non-spam emails I run across in the customer support mailing list.

IgorPartola3• 16 years ago

My former employer has in their guidelines that, in addition to the 10 or so line signature, we needed to attach the department's graphical logo to every e-mail... Can this be considered the signature whale?

joezydeco2• 16 years ago

Half of my company has the "logo in signature" thing and it drives me nuts to no end. Now EVERY email has an attachment to it. I can't tell which emails have important files and which ones are just 200 copies of the company logo in a long thread.

jamesteow• 16 years ago

I do think it's a bit ridiculous to have a graphical logo in the signature. It's an unnecessary exercise in promoting the brand than anything else.

tallanvor• 16 years ago

Mine looks like this:

Don't ask me why the Title comes after the company and group, but it was somebody's bright idea. At least it's only 1 line, maybe 2 if it gets wrapped for some reason.

Of course, they're trying to add a crapload more lines, but I've been resisting it, and will until it's "do it or be fired".

adw• 16 years ago

I was on Usenet enough early enough to get the four-lines religion, and that's enough to get six different ways to contact me in.

(I've elided bits here, not because it's any type of secret - I'm not exactly hard to find - but rather because you know some robot's going to crawl this sooner or later. Seriously: skype spam?!)

  http://timetric.com/
  tel: +44 7*** 9*****  Skype: andrew.***********  twitter: @covert
  2nd Floor, White Bear Yard, 144a Clerkenwell Road, London, EC1R 5DF
  personal: andrew@withpretext.*** http://withpretext.com/

jasonlotito• 16 years ago

Mine

  First Last - Company Name - Department I'm in Charge Of
  ICQ: ######### \ Office: ###-###-#### x### \ Cell: ###-###-####

2 simple lines with information I usually look for in other people's signatures.

> I wish I could reduce the length of my signature

Company mandated?

gaius2• 16 years ago

Heh, one time the company sent round a template signature that we all had to use, and everyone cut and pasted it without reading. So we all had the job title Top Brand Chief.

Natsu• 16 years ago

Why put your email address in the .sig for your email? Don't they already have that, given that they got mail from you?

Or is it meant for the case when someone forwards it 8 times and your email is snipped or abbreviated out?

I usually sign with one or two lines, maximum. Sometimes I don't sign it at all. And it's not a .sig, I type it in every time and I snip out all the rubbish from anything I'm replying to or forwarding (which often includes overly long sigs).

epochwolf2• 16 years ago

We don't always send from our own email accounts.

eiji• 16 years ago

In Germany you are required by law to have a massive signature in your email, if it is part of a "commercial correspondence".

Now the problem is to define "commercial correspondence". When are you talking to a friend or a coworker, inhouse or another company, but there are already poeple, trying to make money in Germany, to rip of firms for emails without signature, that somehow ended up in the "foodchain".

eru5• 16 years ago

You haven't even started talking about need an "Impressum" on your web-page. And fora are especially dangerous devices according to a German judge.

fbailey• 16 years ago

I think as stupid as the term is, the idea is pretty helpful

nas• 16 years ago

I do some work for a company has appends a ~140 word privacy statement to every message (without a sig marker, of course). It includes the phrase "return the original to us by courier collect". sigh

Tichy• 16 years ago

This calls for a URL shortener that points to contact information :-)

ronnier• 16 years ago

That's what this will be great for: http://about.me

limmeau• 16 years ago

You mean, like a homepage?

But seriously: I can understand people use URL shorteners to twitter ephemeral links, and pastebin for syntax-colored code copy&paste. But special-purpose hosting for something slowly-changing like contact information?

lkijuhygtfd2• 16 years ago

Then the recipient would have to first agree that storing the ino about this 'message being confidential' on a 3rd party website was accpetable - you would have to have click through EULAs on each email and make them different depending on the jurisdiction of the recipient.

mfukar• 16 years ago

SPECTREfest 2011 is Feb 7-10 at the bottom of the South China Sea.

This is basically the reason for the existence of signatures..

gvb2• 16 years ago

Don't get me started on stupid quasi-legal disclaimers!

pornel2• 16 years ago

I retaliate with this:

> By accepting this e-mail you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies (”BOGUS AGREEMENTS”) that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

And this is even better:

http://www.andrews-and-arnold.ltd.uk/inboundemailterms.html

gvb2• 16 years ago

OK, I have to tell a war story.

Many years ago (it was on a VAX system), Someone In Authority decided that we needed a "legal" disclaimer tacked onto all of our emails. The system administrator put this into the VAX mail system. Grrrrr!

I noticed that the script the sysadmin used was clever enough to not add a second disclaimer if one was already present in the email. OK, he must be doing a check, but I also noticed that it wasn't an exact check, because it still worked if the disclaimer got line wrapped differently (IIRC).

A bunch of emails to myself later, I had determined what the keywords were and put a disclaimer in my .sig that had those keywords. It was half the length and, IMHO, made more sense than the original.

P.S. To the best of my knowledge, that quasi legal disclaimer never saved the company from any lawsuit or legal expense, but it cost them 4 hours of my time, plus a lot of other engineers' time as they groused about it in the hall.

tokenadult• 16 years ago

I have a workaround for this. My sig is three lines, of which I often omit one on the fly as I send emails: 1) My full name and email user name 2) One organizational affiliation (deleted as needed) 3) Another organizational affiliation (deleted as needed)

For some emails I write for the organization in line 2 on its internal email list, I add a standard disclaimer in one line in place of the organization mentioned in line 3.

If I'm writing a personal email to a person who for business or personal reasons may need to contact me again, then I paste in the BODY of the email a text file of a few lines that gives my full name, postal address in standard format, and telephone numbers (land line and mobile), and also repeats my email address. That reduces the number of emails I get from people who would just be looking for my phone number (for example, from other parents whose children are on the same soccer team as my children, or from new business clients).

duck• 16 years ago

I'm just thankful that HN doesn't allow sigs...

drats• 16 years ago

After reddit and HN I am horrified at even the useless stuff slashdot crams into their comment system but going to php forums of any kind is just another dimension of crazy: multiple animated gifs, the specifications of the machine the person is writing on. Small wonder stackoverflow-like Q/A sites are eating their lunch.

slug• 16 years ago

"And you’re being a conservationist this way. Our precious digital resources will be preserved. Countless bits will be saved. This is one small step for a sustainable Internet."

The author should take a look at the header that come attached to each email message, with its dozens of lines: From,To, Date, Delivery, DKIM, DomainKey, Spam status/score/etc , MIME, Reply-To, Subject, Encoding, etc.

metageek• 16 years ago

Harrumpf. I've been using the same layout for my .sig since 1990; I'm not changing now.

jonknee• 16 years ago

I typically just use initials, can't get much shorter than that.

verdant• 16 years ago

My signature is company mandated, was done by our marketing department (along with all email signatures in our company) and includes 6 lines of contact information, an image of the company logo, and then a disclaimer paragraph (which only gets attached to external email). I don't know how prevalent this is, but many people may (like myself) have no control over the content of their signatures.

davidmurphy• 16 years ago

I completely disagree with this guy.

Doesn't bother me at all, and I get annoyed when contact information I need is not listed.

Stop the Signature File Insanity

Related Stories