You know who you are. You’re stuck in the 1990’s-era novelty of using the Internet. You forward emails with 15 headers in them, forcing us to scroll through 10 pages of text to get to a really bad joke.
With this story, USA Today proves it’s a slow news day problem and I’m not just a curmudgeon. Here are my top five sig file pet peeves.
1) Script Font: Using script font for your name as if you really wrote it yourself. That’s so cute. Not.
2) ASCII Text Art: It’s ugly. See?
3) Any List: It’s a sig file, not a resume. And I don't care if you rode in the same elevator as Seth Godin.
4) Cheese: Automatic calculators tracking how old your kids are and any other related cheery, personal sap.
5) Quotes: I don’t care who said what. It doesn’t make you cool or smart anyway.
Less is more. We just need basic contact info. Thanks.
There's something worse - usually inflicted by admin assistants and people who will describe you as "having a bad case of the Mondays" - and that's embedded backgrounds and fonts.
Nothing like an email with poor colour or an embedded style sheet that screws up your Outlook settings!
Posted by: Colin McKay | 02/28/2007 at 10:40 AM
p30p13 \/\/|-|0 53|\|d \/3|2y 10|\|9
p4|249|24p|-|5 i|\| 0\/3|21y (0|\|7|2i\/3 1337.
And slammers!!!
Posted by: Leo | 02/28/2007 at 10:47 AM
I got one today. The entire sig was
"Wag more, bark less."
I liked it.
Posted by: seth godin | 02/28/2007 at 11:18 AM
Seth - Thanks for stopping by. Less is definitely more.
Posted by: Kevin Dugan | 02/28/2007 at 11:27 AM
Dude, i saw one the other day with a quote from Yoda. Yoda!?
Posted by: Mike Manuel | 02/28/2007 at 03:23 PM
Good one, Kevin! I'm also a big fan of the attached vCard with the sender's birthday in there. I'm gonna send all those guys a card.
Posted by: Donna Papacosta | 02/28/2007 at 03:33 PM
Mike: Lame that is, yes.
Donna: Did the v-card also have gift suggestions?
Posted by: Kevin Dugan | 02/28/2007 at 04:06 PM
My kids, my mother, my closest friends and my spouse have licence to pollute my inbox with drivel.
Everyone else loses points the more crud they include in their signature.
Posted by: Eric Eggertson | 03/01/2007 at 12:42 PM
>> i saw one the other day with a quote from Yoda. Yoda!?
Mike, back in the day, I used to have Yoda's best quote as my email sig. You know the one - "Do. Or do not. There is no try."
Great quote. Did anybody care? Of course not.
The worst email sigs are the ones with embedded graphic files. I never see those as my email is set to display all email as plain text, but they still come as file attachments. And people who include those useless VCF files with every email, not just their first sends but also every reply.
Bloody nuisance.
Posted by: Neville Hobson | 03/02/2007 at 06:20 AM
Neville: The worst part about these offenders is that I often think they are also sending me an attachment when it is simply their sig file. Information overload and a memory issue longterm.
Posted by: Kevin Dugan | 03/02/2007 at 10:29 AM