Email Signatures That Break

A two-line reply with four attachments

Somebody at the office sends a two-line reply. It arrives with a paperclip beside it and four files at the bottom: image001.png, image002.png, image003.jpg and image004.png.

They are the logo, two association badges and an award, all from the signature. In the recipient's email program they never appeared as pictures at all.

Elsewhere the same signature shows as grey boxes with a prompt to download pictures, or as a column of oversized icons on a phone.

Under it all sits a legal notice of a hundred and fifty words, longer than most of the emails it follows.

How signatures break

• Embedded images that many programs list as attachments.
• Linked images blocked until the reader allows them.
• The whole signature as one picture, with nothing to tap or copy.
• Tables and columns that collapse on a phone screen.
• Fonts and colours replaced by the reader's own program.
• Disclaimers longer than the message above them.

The third causes the most trouble for the least reason. A phone number inside an image cannot be tapped, copied into a contact or read by a screen reader, and when the image is blocked, nothing is left at all.

Embedded or linked, both cost something

An image can travel inside the email itself, or be fetched from a web server when the email is opened.

Embedded images arrive whether or not anybody allows them, but many email programs show them as attachments as well, or instead. Every email from the business then appears to carry a file.

Linked images avoid that, but several programs, Outlook on Windows among them, block downloaded pictures until the reader chooses to see them. The logo becomes an empty frame with a warning above it.

No way of adding pictures to a signature works everywhere. Text is the only part that always arrives.

The paperclip problem

For a business that sends real attachments, the false paperclips matter more than the look.

Clients searching their inbox for an invoice or a report often filter for messages with attachments. When every message from you has one, the filter finds all of them.

Replies add to it. Each person in a thread can add their own images, and a long exchange collects small files nobody wanted.

What a signature is for

A signature has a modest job: to say who sent the email and how to reach them some other way.

That means a name, a role, the business name, a direct phone number and the website, plus an address if customers visit. Nothing else needs to be there.

The role earns its place. It tells the reader whether this is the person who does the work, sends the invoices or makes the decisions, which decides who they reply to next time.

Everything else in the typical signature is decoration or marketing, and both work better somewhere a reader chose to look.

A worked example

A payroll service with eight staff sends clients payroll registers, remittance summaries and year-end slips by email, most of them as attachments.

Its signature, designed a few years earlier, was a table holding the logo, a payroll association badge, a local business award and four social icons, above a confidentiality notice of about a hundred and forty words.

Clients said they could not find the real attachments, because every email from the firm carried several. On phones, the icons stacked into a column taller than most of the replies.

The firm moved to a text signature: name, role, the firm's name, a direct line, the main number and the website. The confidentiality notice was cut to a single sentence, in plain text below a blank line.

The association membership moved to the website's about page, and the award was dropped.

The same signature was set up in every staff member's phone app, so a reply sent from a client's office no longer arrives signed only sent from my iPhone.

Disclaimers

Long legal notices at the foot of emails are common, and how much they achieve is debated. Readers, at least, stop seeing them within a week.

If a regulator, a professional body or an insurer requires particular wording, keep exactly that wording, in plain text, beneath the signature.

If nothing requires it, ask whoever advises the business what the notice is meant to do, and write the shortest version that does that job.

Replies, phones and new messages

Outlook allows two default signatures: a full one for new messages and a shorter one for replies and forwards. Use both wherever your program offers them.

A reply deep in a thread needs a name and a direct number, not the full block every time.

Phone apps keep their own signature, separate from the computer's. Set it up on every phone that sends business email, or replies from the field go out with none at all.

If you keep a logo

Some businesses will keep one image, which is reasonable, provided the signature still works without it.

Keep it small, link it from your website rather than embedding it, and give it a short text description, so a blocked image shows the business name rather than an empty frame.

Put every fact in text beside it. If the logo vanishes, nothing important goes with it.

Social icons work better as one line of text links, or not at all. Few people look for a business's Facebook page in an email signature.

The counter-case

Not every signature needs stripping back this far.

A business that emails mostly colleagues inside one organisation, all on the same email program, will see its images behave consistently, and a designed signature costs less there.

A design studio may reasonably want its signature to show some craft, provided the text version stands on its own. And wording a regulator requires stays, whatever its length.

For everything sent to customers, though, a text signature with the facts in it works everywhere.

Rebuilding it

1. Send yourself an email from each device.
2. Open it in Outlook, Gmail and a phone.
3. Count the attachments that are really the signature.
4. Put every fact in plain text.
5. Cut the disclaimer to required wording.
6. Set a shorter signature for replies.
7. Copy it to every phone that sends business email.

Step four is the one that makes the rest safe. Once the name, number and website are text, any image that fails to arrive costs nothing.

The same rule about pictures and live text runs through plain text or designed newsletters.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.