Last time I talked about email, I covered greetings. This time, it’s the other end of the message: sig files.

Used to be the rule was 4 lines of 72 columns, delimited by two hyphens, a space, and a newline. Easy peasy. I’m old-school enough that I still do that, but not everyone does.

A company I worked at sent out a directive to all staff that we were required to use a 17-line HTML sigfile including every possible form of contact, the company slogan, and proud notices of awards recently won by the company (with embedded JPGs of the award logos). Said sigfile also exceeded the default spam threshhold on a standard SpamAssassin install, in part due to its lurid primary-coloured text.

I dropped a line to the marketing folks and explained about the old-school etiquette, and that the monstrosity they suggested would be trapped by spam filters, as well as being considered unacceptably rude on technical mailing lists such as many of the developers were subscribed to. They exempted us techies from the sigfile craziness. We got lucky. I know plenty of people whose work email has more cruft at the bottom than it has headers.

But let’s assume you have the option of making your own sig. What do you put in it? If it’s a business sig, you want to put:

• Your name (first and last)
• Your position/title
• Company name and website
• Contact details

No need to put every form of contact; just the most common ones should suffice. For most of us that means email. Phone if you’re emailing people who might phone you — no point for technical mailing lists, but might be more useful for one-to-one business communications. Fax only if you use it.

The thing here is that you want to consider what your recipients expect. If you’re dealing purely with other geeks, they expect email. If you have to deal with customers, sales types, or other forms of suits, they’re probably going to expect to get hold of you other ways as well.

Then there’s things that don’t belong in your work sig file: humorous quotations, ASCII art, political slogans, and so forth. If you work somewhere like a University or a very liberal company, and mostly deal with other techies, quasi-work-related slogans might be alright. Something tasteful by Larry Wall. But probably not something from Sexy Losers unless you work somewhere pretty unusual.

Remember “#include std_disclaimer.h” that used to be in everyone’s sig? That meant, in essence, “The views expressed in this USENET post do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.” That was back when most posters were at academic institutions and had no private email address. These days, you should have a personal address, unrelated to your employment, for posting to non-work-related newsgroups, websites, personal email, and so forth. When posting to work-related fora (technical mailing lists, again, being a prime example) if you use your work address then you should recall that everything you say does reflect upon your employer whether you like it or not, and be appropriately circumspect.

In effect, the personal email address — whether it’s gmail or your own domain or whatever (I’m assuming that no self-respecting geek uses hotmail or its equivalents) — has replaced the standard disclaimer.

When it comes to personal sigfiles, of course, anything goes. Anything that fits in 4×72, preferably. You still want to include your name (whether it’s the one on your birth certificate or the handle you go by online) and email address and probably the URL of your personal website(s). Yeah, the email address is technically redundant, but it can be handy if, for instance, someone prints out your email in a way that obscures the headers.

There’s really not much more to say on the subject, except to note that if you have a random sigfile generator, you want to make sure to check which quotations show up on each specific email. Simon Cozens tells a story of a time when he was emailing his acceptance of an invitation to speak at a Lightweight Languages conference at MIT. The conference was organised to bring together ‘real world’ language designers with the latest ideas in academic computer science. He accidentally let the email go out with the following quotation:

If computer science was a science, computer “scientists” would study what computer systems do and draw well-reasoned conclusions from it, instead of being rabid clueless wankers who’ve never even seen a real world system before, let alone used one. These are the kind of people that brought us pascal, folks. - Charles J Radder, asr.

Kids, don’t let this happen to you!