I f-ing hate email signatures. For most part they are useless and only take more space than the actual email content is. In my time of receiving emails and providing customer support I have come across a variety of email signatures and other text and image email appendages that are completely unnecessary. It is rare for me to come across an email signature that is simple and small.

People use company logos in addition to their names, emails, alternate emails, phones, mobiles and fax numbers, as well as toll free customer support numbers. To those we corporate addresses, social network addresses, instant messenger addresses and you end up with a lot of information that gets tacked to every email of an email string. Why? It is a waits of bandwidth and space, and also time consuming to sort between the signatures and the actual email content.

Not to mention people who use double and triple signatures, because they are part of multiple organizations or want to show off their affiliations and other sorts of background. Also lets not forget that if you use a free email service, like Hotmail or Yahoo, they also append their own signatures, to promote their service and that they provide free email service. Or when someone emails from a business/corporate account, then there is a security message that comes with the email to inform every recipient that the information contain in the email “is confidential” and sharing it might violate something or another.

Overall there should be some standards to email signatures and what other information may be automatically appended to an email. I doubt that that will come to fruition, though. People and companies have been trying to standardize emails since the email system was invented decades ago, but as we can observe today – this has yet to happen. I would only hope and wish for that email signatures are only appended in an initial email. When there is an existing string of emails going back and forth then there is no need to append a signature. The involved parties clearly know who they are and what they can do. A signature should be appended only if the email string is forwarded to a new recipient.

Another thing that I am not a fan of, but it doesn’t bother me as much is when people forward emails and I can see that the email was forwarded 2, 3, 4 times and I can see tens of emails with each forward section. Not only does this take space, it consumes bandwidth, but most importantly it is a security problem. It creates an opportunity if one of the recipients is a spammer, or pissed at the sender to harvest the emails and use them to SPAM the rest of the recipients or cause damage to the senders reputation.

Are you also bothered by the above issues? Take the poll and let me know by leaving your comments below.

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