RIP .sig
I love InformationWeek for writing this piece about e-mail signatures and what they say about you (via lifehacker). I don’t know about some of the conclusions he comes to, but it’s still a good piece that raises the good ol’ netiquette spectre.
Remember back in the day, your signature had to fit in 4 lines? Or people on the internet would come over to your house and beat you senseless? Or something like that at least.. Back in the day when each of those 4 lines was a lovingly handcrafted bit of ascii art. Your geekcode was painstakingly put together, your pgp lookup and fingerprint information taking up one precious line. A short quote that perfectly encapsulated the moment rounded it all out. It wasn’t easy to make a good signature back then, it was hard but satisfying work.
Now all that’s out the window. People put whatever they want in their .sig file. It isn’t even a .sig file anymore, just a signature. They’ve grown and grown out of control. Email threads are overwhelmed by a series of 20+ line signatures and 3 line emails. It isn’t a matter, as the article tries to say, that the more important you are the shorter your sig. It’s just that there’s no email etiquette anymore, so it’s anything goes. In the olden times when there were fewer people and internet resources were more scarce, it both mattered and was much easier to enforce. In this day of everyone using email and more or less unlimited resources, it doesn’t ultimately matter. Sigh, ah for those golden old days.
I don’t agree with one of their premise that the longer the signature the lower on the totem pole you are. But it’s a nice look at something that used to be important and interesting and now is a place for disclaimers and all manner of anything else.
