The legalese always makes me laugh. There is no implied consent on my behalf – someone has just sent me an email telling me how I should behave. Similarly, why should I have to perform work if someone has sent it to me in error – it’s not my problem, so why should I filter it out and send a reply? Sure, it’s good manners, but it’s not something I legally have to do.

Another fun thing is to demand hardcopies. “So, Bob, I read the last stanza of your email disclaimer. It said you’re not liable for damages due to omissions. If you want my business, send me a hardcopy where you guarantee the quote is full and final”. Amazing how many people arc up over the hardcopy / email signature thing. Well, in truth, I’ve only done it once, but I had a 100% failure percentage :)

Wow, that is completly over the top. But here’s something else I’ve seen:

Composing a simple signature in Word, saving it as HTML, and then adding that to your email (you can do it in Thunderbird at least). For just one line Word adds hundreds (or thousands it seems) of comments and other misc. junk to the HTML file. Whlie you don’t see it all, I’m sure it’s just as long.

And then there are people who have Outlook set to compose mail with Word, which is just as bad.

@ths: I fixed it! The link works now. :)

sorry, the wikipedia link appears broken due to me pasting german umlaut characters. anyway, goto de.wikipedia.org and search for signature, there’s a link to business email signatures.

@Henning: Wikipedia answers this. I never cared exactly for the exact information, I just included the stuff from a company intranet webpage when having been advised to do so.

wikipedia link

Long signatures are ok by me if they contain pertinent information. A good example is what ths says about required information by law. My signature at work is 4 lines, name, title, company name, company phone. I can probably shrink it down to 3 if I wanted to.

What really pisses me off is the huge fonts and/or embedded HTML. We have several people here who have big bright text, hyperlinks, and images in their signatures.

@ths: really? what law is that exactly? Living in germany but never heard that – but it may be a GmbH (limited liability company, for the others) law…

Apart from that:; 5 lines, haha, it used to be correct netiquette to have signatures of max 3 Lines – no 10 years ago… but also back then, some companies had thes stupid “if youre not the person who should get this mail, pleas forget it’s contents” nonsense

Just one question: Do the giant animated gifs count as part of the five line limit?

Yeah long sigs irritate me too – especially the legalese ones with no legal weight. E.g.

This E-mail and any attachments are confidential and may be protected by legal privilege. If you are not the intended recipient, be aware that any disclosure, copying, distribution, or use of this E-mail or any attachment is prohibited. If you have received this E-mail in error, please notify us immediately by returning it to the sender and delete this copy from your system. Thank you.

Sounds nice and all, but anyone with a semester worth of law knows this doesn’t even have the scent of a contract. It isn’t a contract for a hundred reasons – there is no consideration, no acceptance, no offer – and there’s no other law I know of requiring you to honor it. So what does it do? Nothing. It is supposed to sound scary to people who don’t know any better. I tell you what. If you send me something in error, and I don’t like you, or what you said – I’m posting it on the internets. If you’re nice I’ll redact your name & email.

Anyway, as irritating as I find this crap, it is about 10th on my list of email pet peeves, behind everything from using html & embedding huge images, to using comic sans & misspelling things on purpose (e.g. wot? i want u 2 get teh book”). Most of which you’ve covered on this blog.

@ths: Oh wow. I did not realize that. US has no such legislation, and my company doesn’t currently do any business within Germany so I had no idea.

Interesting. But as I said in the post – if you are required to do this kind of stuff by law (or by a pointy haired boss) then it’s fine. It’s just that I knew for a fact that this guy was not required to do this. Hell, there are some people within my company that attach these long things despite the fact we have no policy and/or directive from above to do it.