I guess one reason that we just send this mostly valueless information to each other again and again, is that it takes a little thought and energy to decide not to. I have seen these statements ranging from ~50 characters and 5 words to ~300 characters and 20 words.Īgain, your company may add these notices automatically to outgoing messages, and if they insist, ask them to hack the word count to the minimum. Of course your email service checks incoming and outgoing emails! You wouldn't use it otherwise would you? Treat it like a précis exercise and come up with the shortest notice that includes the necessary semantic content, complies with your local requirements and that reads well.įor UK registered companies I have seen these notices ranging from ~200 characters and ~30 words to 1300+ characters and 220+ words. I mean, really figure out whether every single word in the text is absolutely necessary. If you have to have one - see if you can get the company to make it as short as possible. I don't believe this is required for internal email. In the UK and Germany it is a requirement to include certain information about the company and/or it's directors in outgoing email.

You may have no choice about including this, as it might automatically by added by your email server to all messages leaving the company. Disclaimers, Confidentiality & Legal Notices Use your signature if you are forwarding something on to someone you don't know well or at all. Replies and Forwardsĭo you have to automatically include your signature block every time you reply to a message?Ĭonsider switching that off in your email program. New Messagesĭo you have to automatically include your signature block every time you send a new message? If the message is an internal message and all recipients know who you are.then maybe not. It will still appear in the email, but won't be stored in every email message that you keep.

jpg files doing nothing but wasting space? If you must present your brand image, you could write a smart looking email signature block using CSS (or get someone to do it for you), that links to your logo hosted on your Web site. Graphicsĭon't include graphic images such as your logo. Maybe include a link to your Web site where your correspondent can get further information about your inside leg measurement. There are loads of other chat programs out there. My old eyes and fat fingers mean that I am not so fast on the keyboard of a phone any more. I favour applications such as iMessage, Slack and Skype as I can use my computer, tablet or phone to write or respond to messages. Use a chat program or text messaging for this sort of stuff! iMessage, Slack, Skype, WhatsApp or plain old SMS. Move this stuff completely away from email. Just think of the digital trees that are being wasted and the pointless whizzing of elections around the ether and the megabytes of data that are lounging around on hard drives adding no value.įor more formal communications, that may still need to be printed to hard copy and stored, then that redundant information is going to use up real trees. I did a back-of-a-matchbook calculation and estimate that as little as 2-12% of the kinds of emails is information of value - the semantic content. If your friend was not a colleague, then your email interplay probably included a confidentiality notice and a note to say that the message had been virus checked - each time it went backwards and forwards! You get an email from a colleague and the message thread goes backward and forwards something like thisĭepending on where you work and your company's policies, that message exchange could be predominantly an exchange of email signature blocks. I love getting email from my friends and colleagues, but how much of the content has meaningful value? This is a long standing pet-peeve of mine.

Nvalt andriod companion