Readers Respond: What Does Your E-Mail Signature Say About You?Readers Respond: What Does Your E-Mail Signature Say About You?

Who would have thought signing e-mail was such an interesting subject? We heard from quite a few people with their own observations, following our recent blog about what people's e-mail signatures say about them.

Readers added their $0.02 on whether important people have short sigs, corporate mandates on how employees sign their messages, and more.

Here is a selection of interesting reader comments. (Note that some of these comments were posted on the blog Lifehacker; in those cases, you'll find a link back to the original. Where there's no link, the comment was appended to the original blog post here.)

Legal Disclaimers

After reading some readers' comments, I gave myself a dope-slap for failing to include disclaimers on my list of sig pet peeves.

"McLovin" said:

TroyF. wrote (on Lifehacker): "Companies that put 'legal disclaimers' at the end of all e-mails appear out of touch with reality."

The Longer Your Sig, The Less Important You Are?

Several readers took issue with my observation that long signatures denote low status, while high-status people often use no sigs at all.

"mroonie:" "I actually am not sure if I would say the shorter the sig, the more important you are. I would more likely say that the shorter the sig, the more confident you are. (But, some may say that confidence and importance/status are correlated.)"

"commorancy:" Many of these execs simply do not know how to create a signature in an email application. Worse, they fry, lose or buy a new computer so often, it's just too much of a hassle to keep creating it over and over. So, they don't do it and they manually sign each email with one letter or a small word."

"Geekgrrl77" (on Lifehacker:) "The higher up on the food chain a professor is, the longer their email sig-- i.e. they serve as an assistant dean, are in multiple departments, or have 1-2 named chairs. My advisor is quite a big wig and has a lengthy sig for those reasons."

E-Mail Addresses In Sigs

Several readers took me to task for ridiculing people who include their e-mail addresses in their sigs: "Mike A" (on Lifehacker) said: "At least on Outlook, in an e-mail exchange, sometimes addresses disappear when messages are forwarded, etc. so having the e-mail address in the signature has helped me countless times."

Leave Out The IM Addresses

Several people disagreed with my practice of including my IM addresses in my signature file:

"PK:" "Please. Do I really want everyone who gets an e-mail from me then popping up in my IM client? It's already all I can do to fend off the dozens of vendor cold calls per week."

In particular, my habit of putting my Second Life ID in my e-mail got me some raps on the knuckles. TechGuy said: "Anybody that has enough time to sit around playing games like Second Life at work and worring about what a signature says about someone is probably getting paid too much."

OK, I gotta call foul on that one - Second Life is not a game.

No Choice

Several readers said e-mail users often don't have a choice what to include in their sigs:

Tina: "The EU has requirements for what email signatures from registered corporations have to include."

"Heartburnkid" (on Lifehacker): "My company has Exchange set to automatically attach a disclaimer to all messages going outside the company mail server, and it drives me nuts. I can't even participate in any (work-related!) mailing lists without everybody on the list griping about it. And justifiably so, but I'm powerless to do anything about it; I'm just the local IT admin, and the mail servers are on the other side of the country."

Wrapping Up

NJ Mike offered a simple thumb rule: "Rule #1 - if your signature is longer than the message itself, it is too long."

And a few people thought the whole blog post was a waste of time:

"Ricardo:" "Who the heck has time to change these things all the time? Put the info YOU think best serves YOU and be done with it. This is up there with debating which way you put the toilet paper roll."

This, of course, launched a discussion of which way you should put the toilet paper roll. Over or under? The correct answer is, of course, over.