Does Your E-Mail Signature Smell Like Spam?

Sometime around five or so years ago, it became du rigueur to have e-mail signatures in a format not unlike this:

Joe Salesman
Marketing Associate

joe@companyxyz.ca
Ph.  +1 (604) 555-1234
Fax +1 (604) 555-4321
http://www.companyxyz.ca

Notice Regarding Confidentiality of Transmission: This message is intended only for the person to which it is addressed and contains information that is privileged and confidential. If you are not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that it is actually our mistake and you can do whatever you want since disclaimers like this don't constitute any kind of enforceable contract

Sadly the marketing types that continue to insist on this type of HTML-based signature in the name of "corporate branding"  and legal departments that insist on the unenforceable disclaimers are, in fact, causing untold amounts of valid e-mails to be intercepted by anti-spam filters.

In more recent years, as spam-filtering has become standard, spammers adapted to the text-based spam-filtering software by instead embedding a single image bearing the text of their message plus some innocuous random prose. Forces on the anti-spam side of things retaliated by

1. looking for messages with a single in-line image with a small amount of text,
2. checking if the in-line image is a GIF,
3. checking for a block of text that is in a fainter or smaller font after the in-line image, and
4. checking if the in-line image is predominantly text or text-like shapes (since the spammers frequently obfuscate the text to avoid even higher scores from OCR aware spam-scanners.)

The circa-2004 signatures hit all of these criteria, unnecessarily raising the aggregate spam score for the message as a whole. Toss something like this on the end of a valid e-mail to a client that bears something like a price list with a dollar-signs and maybe some three or four letter acronyms that are going to trip even more spam rules designed around thwarting pill-pushers and bogus stock promotions and the chances of the message not getting though get even higher.

And then there is the problem if it does get through and a conversation ensues with each participant's mail client quoting the preceding signatures and dutifully tagging on yet another such that the few hundred bytes of actual content are unreadably interspersed among kilobytes of corporate logos and verbose disclaimers. It may be trivial in the context of a single message, but when every single message is orders of magnitude larger than it needs to be to carry its actual content, it compounds into storage problems and compliance problems.  

I say it's time to go back to the future. Once upon a time, back in the days of Usernet and text-only e-mails netiquette demanded that signatures be no longer than four 72-character lines of text and should begin with two dashes and a space (i.e. "-- ".)

The short signatures were to preserve the very much more limited bandwidth and storage, which remains a good thing, but they also have the added advantage now of being more spam-scanner-friendly and readable in a long thread. Readability would be further enhanced with the return of the dash-dash-space convention, since this would allow redundant signatures to easily be stripped off programmatically.

In short, this is what a good signature should look like:

--
Joe Salesman, Marketing Associate
CompanyXYZ - http://www.companyxyz.com
joe@companyxyz.com
Phone: +1 (604) 555-1234 / Fax: +1 (604) 555-4321

Or even better:

--
Michael R. Barrick
mbarrick@mbarrick.com
http://www.mbarrick.com