Signature block
Encyclopedia
A signature block is a block of text automatically appended at the bottom of an e-mail
message, Usenet
article, or forum
post. This has the effect of "signing off" the message and in a reply message of indicating that no more response follows. It is common practice for a signature block to consist of one or more lines containing some brief information on the author of the message. Note that a sig block is not the same as a digital signature
. A sig block is easily forged, whereas a digital signature uses cryptographic techniques to provide verifiable proof of authorship
.
Information usually contained in a signature block includes the poster's name, phone number and email address, along with other contact details if required, such as URL
s for sites owned or favoured by the author. A quotation is often included (occasionally automatically generated by such tools as fortune
), or an ASCII art
picture. Strict rules of capitalization are not followed. Among some groups of people it has been common to include self-classification codes, though the practice is waning.
and Eudora, can be configured to automatically append an e-mail signature with each new message. A shortened form of a signature block (sometimes called a "signature line"), only including one's name, often with some distinguishing prefix, can be used to simply indicate the end of a post or response. Most e-mail servers can be configured to append e-mail signatures to all outgoing mail as well. However, when multiple replies to the same post occur, care should be taken to prevent multiple signatures from building up so that message lengths remains legible and message size manageable.
Since by definition these blocks are added automatically to a message, usually regardless of its content, there are guidelines of netiquette
regarding their size. The most common guideline, called the McQuary limit
, is a size of no more than four lines of less than eighty columns each. This keeps the overall size of the message down, conserving bandwidth
as well as the time required to read the message, and ensures that eighty-column terminals
can display the sig block properly.
The formatting of the sig block is prescribed somewhat more firmly: it should be displayed as plain text
in a fixed-width font (no HTML
, images, or other rich text
), and must be delimited from the body of the message by a single line consisting of exactly two hyphens, followed by a space, followed by the end of line (i.e., "-- \n"). This latter prescription, which goes by many names, including "sig dashes", "signature cut line", "sig-marker", and "sig separator", allows software to automatically mark or remove the sig block as the receiver desires. The signature prefix chosen can be different for different people serving as a distinguishing feature of their signatures. A correct delimiter is required for a news posting program to receive the Good Netkeeping Seal of Approval
.
scanning methods, and so forth.
Germany has laws requiring companies to disclose their company name, registration number, place of registration etc. in e-mail signatures. Ireland's Director of Corporate Enforcement
requires all limited companies operating websites to disclose such information in their e-mails. The UK's ECommerce Regulations require this information in all emails from limited companies as well. While criticized by some as overly bureaucratic, these regulations only extend existing laws for (paper) business correspondence to email.
s typically are not operated within the same constraints as text interface applications. Users will typically use a "signature" text area in their given profile for input, which can then allow a user to turn off signatures. Depending on the board's capabilities, signatures may range from a simple line or two of text to an elaborately-constructed HTML piece. Image
s are often allowed as well, including dynamically updated images usually hosted remotely and modified by a server-side script.
Signatures are seen as an art form by many of their creators, and there are many websites centered around their creation and display. Some of these websites have competitions, battles and signature of the week contests, where members submit their entries to have them featured on the website.
, echomail and netmail software would often add an origin line at the end of a message. This would indicate the FidoNet address and name of the originating system (not the user). The user posting the message would generally not have any control over the origin line. However, single-line tagline
s, added under user control, would often contain a humorous or witty saying. Multi-line user signature blocks were rare.
However, a tearline standard for FidoNet was included in FTS-0004 and clarified in FSC-0068 as three dashes optionally followed by a space optionally followed by text.
E-mail
Electronic mail, commonly known as email or e-mail, is a method of exchanging digital messages from an author to one or more recipients. Modern email operates across the Internet or other computer networks. Some early email systems required that the author and the recipient both be online at the...
message, Usenet
Usenet
Usenet is a worldwide distributed Internet discussion system. It developed from the general purpose UUCP architecture of the same name.Duke University graduate students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979 and it was established in 1980...
article, or forum
Internet forum
An Internet forum, or message board, is an online discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages. They differ from chat rooms in that messages are at least temporarily archived...
post. This has the effect of "signing off" the message and in a reply message of indicating that no more response follows. It is common practice for a signature block to consist of one or more lines containing some brief information on the author of the message. Note that a sig block is not the same as a digital signature
Digital signature
A digital signature or digital signature scheme is a mathematical scheme for demonstrating the authenticity of a digital message or document. A valid digital signature gives a recipient reason to believe that the message was created by a known sender, and that it was not altered in transit...
. A sig block is easily forged, whereas a digital signature uses cryptographic techniques to provide verifiable proof of authorship
Non-repudiation
Non-repudiation refers to a state of affairs where the purported maker of a statement will not be able to successfully challenge the validity of the statement or contract. The term is often seen in a legal setting wherein the authenticity of a signature is being challenged...
.
Information usually contained in a signature block includes the poster's name, phone number and email address, along with other contact details if required, such as URL
Uniform Resource Locator
In computing, a uniform resource locator or universal resource locator is a specific character string that constitutes a reference to an Internet resource....
s for sites owned or favoured by the author. A quotation is often included (occasionally automatically generated by such tools as fortune
Fortune (program)
fortune is a simple program that displays a pseudorandom message from a database of quotations that first appeared in Version 7 Unix. The most common version on modern systems is the BSD fortune, originally written by Ken Arnold...
), or an ASCII art
ASCII art
ASCII art is a graphic design technique that uses computers for presentation and consists of pictures pieced together from the 95 printable characters defined by the ASCII Standard from 1963 and ASCII compliant character sets with proprietary extended characters...
picture. Strict rules of capitalization are not followed. Among some groups of people it has been common to include self-classification codes, though the practice is waning.
E-mail and Usenet
An e-mail signature is a block of text appended to the end of an e-mail message often containing the sender's name, address, phone number, disclaimer or other contact information. Most e-mail clients, including Mozilla ThunderbirdMozilla Thunderbird
Mozilla Thunderbird is a free, open source, cross-platform e-mail and news client developed by the Mozilla Foundation. The project strategy is modeled after Mozilla Firefox, a project aimed at creating a web browser...
and Eudora, can be configured to automatically append an e-mail signature with each new message. A shortened form of a signature block (sometimes called a "signature line"), only including one's name, often with some distinguishing prefix, can be used to simply indicate the end of a post or response. Most e-mail servers can be configured to append e-mail signatures to all outgoing mail as well. However, when multiple replies to the same post occur, care should be taken to prevent multiple signatures from building up so that message lengths remains legible and message size manageable.
Since by definition these blocks are added automatically to a message, usually regardless of its content, there are guidelines of netiquette
Netiquette
Netiquette is a set of social conventions that facilitate interaction over networks, ranging from Usenet and mailing lists to blogs and forums. These rules were described in IETF RFC 1855. However, like many Internet phenomena, the concept and its application remain in a state of flux, and vary...
regarding their size. The most common guideline, called the McQuary limit
Alt.fan.warlord
alt.fan.warlord is a Usenet newsgroup dedicated to the dissection and flaming of signature files used in other Usenet groups. The newsgroup was best-known during the early and mid-1990s, and can no longer be considered active...
, is a size of no more than four lines of less than eighty columns each. This keeps the overall size of the message down, conserving bandwidth
Bandwidth (computing)
In computer networking and computer science, bandwidth, network bandwidth, data bandwidth, or digital bandwidth is a measure of available or consumed data communication resources expressed in bits/second or multiples of it .Note that in textbooks on wireless communications, modem data transmission,...
as well as the time required to read the message, and ensures that eighty-column terminals
Computer terminal
A computer terminal is an electronic or electromechanical hardware device that is used for entering data into, and displaying data from, a computer or a computing system...
can display the sig block properly.
The formatting of the sig block is prescribed somewhat more firmly: it should be displayed as plain text
Plain text
In computing, plain text is the contents of an ordinary sequential file readable as textual material without much processing, usually opposed to formatted text....
in a fixed-width font (no HTML
HTML
HyperText Markup Language is the predominant markup language for web pages. HTML elements are the basic building-blocks of webpages....
, images, or other rich text
Rich Text Format
The Rich Text Format is a proprietary document file format with published specification developed by Microsoft Corporation since 1987 for Microsoft products and for cross-platform document interchange....
), and must be delimited from the body of the message by a single line consisting of exactly two hyphens, followed by a space, followed by the end of line (i.e., "-- \n"). This latter prescription, which goes by many names, including "sig dashes", "signature cut line", "sig-marker", and "sig separator", allows software to automatically mark or remove the sig block as the receiver desires. The signature prefix chosen can be different for different people serving as a distinguishing feature of their signatures. A correct delimiter is required for a news posting program to receive the Good Netkeeping Seal of Approval
Good Netkeeping Seal of Approval
The Good NetKeeping Seal of Approval or GNKSA is a designation that indicates a piece of Usenet newsreader software meets a set of usability and formatting standards...
.
E-mail signatures in business
Many corporations have internal policies requiring outgoing e-mails to have lengthy "signatures" appended to them, listing dozens of contact methods, disclaiming legal liabilities, notifying of virusComputer virus
A computer virus is a computer program that can replicate itself and spread from one computer to another. The term "virus" is also commonly but erroneously used to refer to other types of malware, including but not limited to adware and spyware programs that do not have the reproductive ability...
scanning methods, and so forth.
Germany has laws requiring companies to disclose their company name, registration number, place of registration etc. in e-mail signatures. Ireland's Director of Corporate Enforcement
Director of Corporate Enforcement
The Office of the Director of Corporate Enforcement in Ireland was set up by the Irish Government on November 28, 2001 as a consequence of the proceedings and the conclusions of various review groups, courts, tribunals of inquiry and parliamentary committees in recent years...
requires all limited companies operating websites to disclose such information in their e-mails. The UK's ECommerce Regulations require this information in all emails from limited companies as well. While criticized by some as overly bureaucratic, these regulations only extend existing laws for (paper) business correspondence to email.
Internet forums
On web forums, the rules are often less strict on how a signature block is formatted, as Web browserWeb browser
A web browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web. An information resource is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier and may be a web page, image, video, or other piece of content...
s typically are not operated within the same constraints as text interface applications. Users will typically use a "signature" text area in their given profile for input, which can then allow a user to turn off signatures. Depending on the board's capabilities, signatures may range from a simple line or two of text to an elaborately-constructed HTML piece. Image
Image
An image is an artifact, for example a two-dimensional picture, that has a similar appearance to some subject—usually a physical object or a person.-Characteristics:...
s are often allowed as well, including dynamically updated images usually hosted remotely and modified by a server-side script.
Signatures are seen as an art form by many of their creators, and there are many websites centered around their creation and display. Some of these websites have competitions, battles and signature of the week contests, where members submit their entries to have them featured on the website.
FidoNet
With FidoNetFidoNet
FidoNet is a worldwide computer network that is used for communication between bulletin board systems. It was most popular in the early to mid 1990s, prior to the introduction of easy and affordable access to the Internet...
, echomail and netmail software would often add an origin line at the end of a message. This would indicate the FidoNet address and name of the originating system (not the user). The user posting the message would generally not have any control over the origin line. However, single-line tagline
Tagline
A tagline is a variant of a branding slogan typically used in marketing materials and advertising. The idea behind the concept is to create a memorable phrase that will sum up the tone and premise of a brand or product , or to reinforce the audience's memory of a product...
s, added under user control, would often contain a humorous or witty saying. Multi-line user signature blocks were rare.
However, a tearline standard for FidoNet was included in FTS-0004 and clarified in FSC-0068 as three dashes optionally followed by a space optionally followed by text.
See also
- Kibo, a Usenet poster famous for his absurdly long signature.
- Signature tagSignature tagSignature tags or sig tags are small digital images that are used to accompany an HTML-formatted email or Internet forum post. They are also often used on social networking pages...
External links
- RFC 1855, "Netiquette Guidelines" (section 2.1.1 contains guidelines on mail)
- RFC 3676, (4.3 Usenet Signature Convention)
- What are the restrictions for a proper signature?
- Information Release from Ireland's ODCE (pdf)
- A collection of sigs found on Slashdot
- Email Signatures examples Articles and tips via WiseStamp