I use a signature at work. Nearly all of us do. It has vital information about contacting us and many times it has a cutesy little tag line saying something “profound”. Also, more and more signatures have a confidentiality statement at the end. Some have every voice method of contact in their signature: phone number, extension, cell phone, IM, Skype, etc. I personally have my phone number on my official signature at work (not by choice, mind you, but by decree).

We can debate the usefulness of having all this stuff in our email until we are blue in the face and get absolutely nowhere. The thing is, when I send a 10 word email and I’ve got my name, company, title, address, phone number, fax number, cell number, tag line and confidentiality paragraph…. my signature is longer than my email. Much longer. How much space in my mailbox (that we are limited to 100 megabytes) is actually being taken up by all this signature clutter? And then there’s the graphics included in some signatures. Yeah, they look nice but are they really necessary? Many are scaled TIFFs that are HUGE and take up a lot of space in my mailbox (and the sender doesn’t even realize what they have done, they just like the look of the graphic).

And here’s the kicker: WHY do people include their email address in their signature? When you get an email from someone don’t you already HAVE their email address just by receiving the freakin’ email!? What, are you going to add someone’s email address to your personal address book (Contacts in Outlook lingo) that didn’t actually send you an email but you saw their email address in the chain of forwards and replies and thought it was a good idea to add it? Are we THAT hard up for email addresses or do we just want to seem important by having more entries?

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