Why are signatures so bad?


Message from reader Steven Hambleton:

Despite the power and intelligence available to companies like Microsoft and Google, we still have five instances of our image-laden signature staring back at us when we reply to an email conversation.

Why oh why can’t they detect a duplicate and snip it off? We only need it once!

I’m with Steven on this one.

I like having a signature, as it gives me some kind of warm-fuzzy feeling that every bit of email I write does a tiny bit of marketing for me. Mine is a simple reminder of the big projects I work on. But it makes me an offender of signature-creep:

Hey. Sorry.

Seems like the kind of thing huge tech companies can solve. For the most part, I never see that stuff, thanks to the […] menu I get in Inbox.

But still, I see it often enough it’s silly and obnoxious. Particularly when the signature is massive. Like this kind of thing:

That just came up in an Google Image Search for “massive email signature”.

That would be a cool paid feature for an email client:

We chop off email signatures.


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