I don't mind as long as it's preceded by:<p><pre><code> "-- \n"
</code></pre>
My e-mail client will then de-emphasise it and automatically remove when replying.<p><a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3676#section-4.3" rel="nofollow">http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3676#section-4.3</a>
In Germany you are required by law to have a massive signature in your email, if it is part of a "commercial correspondence".<p>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".
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.
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...
I wonder what the author would think of Kibo and his sig:<p><a href="http://www.birdhouse.org/etc/kibosig.txt" rel="nofollow">http://www.birdhouse.org/etc/kibosig.txt</a>
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.
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)<p>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.<p>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).
I'm guilty of this... This the signature I'm using.<p><pre><code> 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
</code></pre>
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.
"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."<p>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.
Why not use one of the web services that puts everything in one place? Then just add the url to your sig.<p>I happen to use this one, for example: <a href="http://myonepage.com" rel="nofollow">http://myonepage.com</a>