Mobile Email Signatures Might Not Send the Message You Think

I have been on a rant this week about the way people have gotten sloppy with business writing in the new social media age. 

Over use of exclamation points (see this post by The Grammer Guru), run on sentences or posts with no punctuation, and other bad habits have rubbed me the wrong way all week.  When someone forwarded me this post about Blackberry signatures, it seemed relevant so I am reposting it here.

Now, if I can just remember how to edit my Blackberry signature.

(This post was written by Kevin Purdy and appeared on Lifehacker.com)

You've seen them before—email signatures that start "Sent from my," and sometimes end with an even more explicit apology for length and typos. One research analyst makes an intriguing argument against them and their implicit you're-not-all-that-important message.

In an age where one email account can be gotten at from multiple locations, an email signature can be a prompt as to where to reach a message respondent—that's the best case scenario, anyways. Craig Roth, a VP with IT firm Gartner Reasearch, suggests that such mobile signatures instead serve as salt on the wound, especially when messages are sent as quick replies with little consideration:

In fact, one email I received had modified that tagline to read "Sent via blackberry please excuse any typos." (note the built-in irony of the missing capitalization, comma, and word ‘so'. She may as well have misspelled it "tipos" to make the irony complete)

... (I) find an increasing proportion of instances where that signature follows an email that is annoyingly short on details and fails to form a connection. For example, I may have brought up a complex issue and just had one minor part of it responded to.

The ideal solution, it seems, is to send a short reply indicating you'll be following up with a longer message when you're back at a real keyboard—I've received these messages from press agents and technology reps, and they never once raised my blood pressure. Otherwise, it might be worth considering how to wipe out your "Sent from my" signature.

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