Email signatures

It may be telling that I want to keep typing .signature instead of signature – I may be a bit old school. But I’ve also given up on keeping HTML out of signatures (and email in general), so I guess I’m adapting somewhat.

Regardless, the topic came up at work today about what we should have in our standard corporate signature, and here are the points I replied with based on my 20 years of having to read email…

• The content of your email should be more interesting than your signature – don’t distract from the email content with a flashy signature
• The postal address should be on our website, not in email signatures
• If nobody has faxed you anything in the past 6 months then probably not worth it to include a fax number, put it on the website too
• Be aware of the size of images you’re including, and that attaching them to email adds another 1/3 because of encoding
• Signatures should start with dash-dash-space (-- ) then a newline, then the rest of the signature
• Signatures should not exceed 4 lines, unless a legal disclaimer is required
• If you’re going to include an email address make it clickable; probably the same with twitter, link to twitter.com/whatever
• You should include whatever phone numbers you actually answer / are expected to answer