Sign Here Please

Like everyone else, I get a huge amount of email. Many of these messages have signature files at the bottom. Most of the time they are simple one or two line paragraphs that include the person’s name and phone number.

Every once in a while I’ll get one with a famous quote or clever saying. These are nice but some senders feel the need to add paragraphs of information including their email address (I know what it is because you just sent me an email), fax number, home address, names of their children and a bunch of useless data.

In the early days of email, signature files (and .plan files) in the Unix environment were unique and fun. Now they are becoming increasingly annoying.

Some emailers with too much time on their hands, create these elaborate signature files with animated GIF files that couldn’t be more irritating. I’m sure these people think they’re being clever but these signature files are about as tacky as pink flamingo or roaming gnome lawn ornaments.

Have you seen the ones with the name in a tacky neon green 72pt script font that’s barely legible but nonetheless extremely gaudy? How about the ones where an image is pasted into the signature box and stretched out of proportion making it blurry and illigible.

My philosophy for email: keep it short and simple. Don’t waste bandwith on stupid signature files that take up more disk space than the message itself. And get to the point with your message too, I won’t sift through a bunch of dribble just to get to your one line of useful information. You’ll be wasting your time emailing me such crap as I won’t read it.

And please no animated GIF’s of hopping bunnies in your SIG file.

For some good examples of annoying signature files, visit The Gallery of Annoying Email Signatures.