alex chiang: web 6.0

Today’s piece of Digg-fodder is “Six ways to make a good email signature”.

ORLY?

The very first tip is:

1. Keep it short. Seven lines is good. Mine happens to be 8, because I also include a row of “=” to separate it from my text.

Wow, way to hand out completely incorrect advice by the second sentence! At the risk of sounding mean, the author probably grew up thinking that “lol a/s/l?” was standard nomenclature for saying “hello”.

RFC 1855 has been around since 1995, but merely codifies a long series of convention that has existed since ARPAnet. If that’s too confusing to read, try Gopi Sundaram’s email signatures page.

The only two things you need to know are:

1. Four lines or less, 80 columns max (the McQ limit)
2. use sig-dashes (single dash, single dash, space, newline) to separate the signature from the body

Everything else is superfluous.

For what it’s worth, these days, I don’t even bother with a .signature anymore (but when I did, it was surely McQ-compliant).

This concludes your grouchy unix-guy rant for the day.