My Opinion:- Why Email Signatures are wasteful

For today's post I will be serving a dish that is heavily saturated in my personal opinion.

I am of the firm belief that email signatures (as they are currently being used by 99% of businesses and private consumers) is entirely wasteful and is exceptionally redundant.

Before you disregard me as a heretic, let me explain why I believe this is so...

The majority of email messages that are sent (not including unsolicited advertisements) will include some kind of message signature, which depending on the company or organization that you work for may include some logo, accreditations and even perhaps a legal disclaimer.

So email Sig's are trying to fill these basic needs
- Tell the person who you are
- Who you work for
- How to contact you

- Legal disclaimers

Telling the person who you are, well the very first time you communicate with someone this could be quite useful to confirm to the other person who you are, but it's certainly not necessary to include your life story.

Regards,

Karl

Who you work for, for most people this should be pretty obvious, if I have a message from Joe@Blogs.com it's pretty likely that Joe works for Blogs.com. Only exception could be very large companies with multiple branches, however that could be explained in one line.

Regards, Joe Blogs

Accounts Team

Blogs.Com

How to contact you, do you end end every single call with "if you want to call my mobile number is, if you want to call my office number is, if you want to email my address is...", probably not (and if you do, it's likely you wont have any friends) and the reason being is if the person wishes to return your call its a good chance they will have your number, with email they will definitely have a way to contact you (reply address) and if they need to call you can simply provide the details in the body of your email.

Hi Joe,

Can you please call me on 040x xxx xxx, when you get a chance so we can discuss the project.

Regards,

Karl

In my current job the policy is to include the company logo, contact details amongst other things in every email. This doesn't particularly take up that much space (~13 kilobytes) but I would estimate it is on the lower end of the scale.

Using some simple maths, I know that company wide we sent approximately 4,000 emails in the last 2 weeks. Based upon that small sample my 13 kilobyte sig would count for a massive 1.3 Gb over the course of a year.

What does that 1.3 Gb email tell you that you don't already know (or can't easily find out)... extra downloads from your ISP that you probably don't really need.

If this is scaled to the entire Web with the millions of emails that are sent every day, the simple email sig starts to add (in my opinion) an unnecessary overhead.

Do your bit for the environment and don't send me your email sig!