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Stop the Signature File Insanity
- thristian 16y agoBack 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.
- DLWormwood 16y agoYes, 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.)
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- mayank 16y agoI had to google for that: http://www.birdhouse.org/etc/kibosig.txt http://www.birdhouse.org/etc/kibosig.txt
- leif 16y ago> This blank region of empty space is a hollow void that adds lines to the > length of this .signature's physical size. > > I cant think of anything more to add!
- pbhjpbhj 16y agoName, address and contact details should be in an address file attached to the mail, no?
- liedra 16y agoNo, 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 16y agoOur recent company-mandated sig includes 5 attachments.
- pbhjpbhj 16y agoAgain 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?
- liedra 16y agoYes, I am sure, or I wouldn't have mentioned it. Not everyone uses Thunderbird. (I use Mail.app for OS X and roundcube webmail. Both display them as attachments.) tbh, I don't pay attention to priority ever, since the only people who use it when they email me are spammers. So the moral is: not everyone uses the same client as you, and not everyone uses email the same way as you. To piss off the least number of people, go for a lowest common denominator thing. This is also why I always use plain text email.
- pbhjpbhj 16y ago
- 1tw 16y agoI wonder what the author would think of Kibo and his sig: http://www.birdhouse.org/etc/kibosig.txt http://www.birdhouse.org/etc/kibosig.txt
- illdave 16y agoThat's just extraordinary.
- JeffJenkins 16y agoIt's like the Time Cube of email signatures
- DLWormwood 16y agoKibo would scoff at such an upstart. The ’Net god is truly an Ancient One; he was posting to USENET long before Eternal September began.
- eru 16y agoTalking about Ancient Gods: http://www.cthulhu.org/ http://www.cthulhu.org/
- lkijuhygtfd 16y agoTypical - there's no contact info in the God's .sig Suppose I want to serve him a writ?
- khafra 16y agoThe author would probably say "once you have a minor religion following you, you can do whatever you want in your sig, too."
- auxbuss 16y agoWhy 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 http://myonepage.com
- gaius 16y agoEven 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...
- IgorPartola 16y agoAt 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.
- davnola 16y agoI'd love to see how you come up with that number.
- IgorPartola 16y agoI remember that I took into account the amount of storage and the hard drive capacity and the power consumption, etc. Here's a new calculation: assume your e-mail server has user/server ratio of 1000/1. Assume the server uses 500 watts power (server + UPS + cooling + lighting). Assume each user has 10,000 e-mails stored on this server. We get 500W/1000 users/10,000 emails per user = 0.00005 Watts/email. 0.00005 Watts/email * 365 * 24 = 0.438 W*hours/email. Small but significant over your 10,000 emails. [edit]: fixed my glaring mistakes. That's what happens when you rush.
- pornel 16y agoI 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 http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3676#section-4.3
- eru 16y agoYes. But the guy is talking about `bold' in emails.. He's at a completely different level.
- solutionyogi 16y agoI 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.
- epochwolf 16y agoI'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.
- IgorPartola 16y agoMy 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?
- joezydeco 16y agoHalf 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.
- eru 16y agoYou can probably script your email client (or similar) to filter those logos.
- joezydeco 16y agoI'm on gApps and use the web interface a lot. I'll have to look through that stuff. Thanks. {edit} Nothing there. Great. You know what, signature and signature processing in gMail sucks. Why can't the web interface know I'm mailing someone in the same organization and NOT include the signature? Why can't it skip the legal block that my company requires if it's already in the email thread? Let's put the self-driving priuses on hold for a while and get some real functionality in there, Google!
- eiji 16y agoIn 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".
- eru 16y agoYou 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 16y agoI think as stupid as the term is, the idea is pretty helpful
- nas 16y agoI 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 16y agoThis calls for a URL shortener that points to contact information :-)
- ronnier 16y agoThat's what this will be great for: http://about.me http://about.me
- limmeau 16y agoYou 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?
- lkijuhygtfd 16y agoThen 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 16y agoSPECTREfest 2011 is Feb 7-10 at the bottom of the South China Sea. This is basically the reason for the existence of signatures..
- gvb 16y agoDon't get me started on stupid quasi-legal disclaimers!
- pornel 16y agoI 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 http://www.andrews-and-arnold.ltd.uk/inboundemailterms.html
- gvb 16y agoOK, 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 16y agoI 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 16y agoI'm just thankful that HN doesn't allow sigs...
- drats 16y agoAfter 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 16y 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 16y agoHarrumpf. I've been using the same layout for my .sig since 1990; I'm not changing now.
- jonknee 16y agoI typically just use initials, can't get much shorter than that.
- verdant 16y agoMy 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 16y agoI completely disagree with this guy. Doesn't bother me at all, and I get annoyed when contact information I need is not listed.