
Stop the Signature File Insanity - illdave
http://gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/14/stop-signature-file-insanity/
======
pornel
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>

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

------
eiji
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".

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

------
thristian
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.

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

~~~
leif

        > 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!

------
gaius
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...

~~~
IgorPartola
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.

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

~~~
IgorPartola
I 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.

~~~
davnola
You're out by a factor of a 10^4. You forgot to divide by 1000 to get KW from
W, and you accidentally scaled everything up by 10, too. Still, the correct
figure is meaningless too.

~~~
sophacles
I cannot trust your declaration of meaningless, since you seem to think that
KW somehow matters to his calculation. There is no term that is originally in
KW (thus requiring conversion) nor is there any term which he presents in
terms of W which is usually presented in terms of KW (thus having a hidden
error).

~~~
davnola
Yup because he corrected it (read his edit)

~~~
sophacles
I see. Yet another reason to disapprove of edits :/

------
1tw
I wonder what the author would think of Kibo and his sig:

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

~~~
illdave
That's just extraordinary.

~~~
JeffJenkins
It's like the Time Cube of email signatures

~~~
DLWormwood
Kibo 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
Talking about Ancient Gods: <http://www.cthulhu.org/>

~~~
lkijuhygtfd
Typical - there's no contact info in the God's .sig

Suppose I want to serve him a writ?

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

~~~
pornel
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>

------
verdant
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.

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

~~~
drats
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.

------
epochwolf
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.

~~~
IgorPartola
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?

~~~
joezydeco
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.

~~~
eru
You can probably script your email client (or similar) to filter those logos.

~~~
joezydeco
I'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!

~~~
dctoedt
AutoHotKey hack for GMail and Google Apps sigs:
<http://www.autohotkey.com/forum/topic31346.html>

------
slug
"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.

------
mfukar
_SPECTREfest 2011 is Feb 7-10 at the bottom of the South China Sea._

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

------
auxbuss
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>

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

~~~
ronnier
That's what this will be great for: <http://about.me>

~~~
limmeau
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?

------
davidmurphy
I completely disagree with this guy.

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

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

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

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

~~~
liedra
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.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
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?

~~~
liedra
Yes, 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
Do you use lynx for browsing the web too?

~~~
liedra
Sorry, what's that got to do with anything? Email is not the same as web
browsing. You can't compare the two.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Curiousity - I used links2 for a while, it's like lynx with images and some
minimal js support.

Anyhow, I find images in email incredibly useful - it makes it an extra couple
of steps for a lot of things if one has to upload or serve an image and the
recipient then has to follow a link to get images.

What area of work are you in? Not big on branding?

I'll have to get some time with Mail.app, does it make no distinction between
inline images and attachments either? How about encoded images that are
inlined - do they show as attachments too?

I do know that OSX handles vcards very well so I'm kinda surprised it treats
them as straight attachments but still don't think that matters so much.

~~~
liedra
Sorry, only just got back to comments today. I'm in academia, so yes, not big
on branding. The only attachments I like to receive are papers, calls for
papers, agendas, student work, stuff like that. These tend to be important and
can get lost in the pile if every email comes with an attachment.

Mail.app handles any attachments as attachments (even inline ones). If images
are linked to as part of HTML email it will display them (but not by default
due to spam tracking -- you have to click a button to display them), and not
count them as attachments though.

