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Article:
Signatures -- The Long and Short of It by: Doug Davis What is the accepted standard for signatures? Who sets these standards? The signatures in question are those blurbs that we include after the body of our main message content in our emails for the purpose of identification and contacts. I'm really not referring to signatures in the respect that Usenet Newsgroups see them. It is pretty much agreed by established netiquette that Usenet signatures should be limited to five lines or less. They should, or may, contain: Your name: Doug Davis Your email: dougd@cros.net Your company: Northern Research What you do: Publisher Your URL: http://www.couch-potato-marketing.com/ezine You can shave a line or two from the above by combining your name and email address plus your company with what you do: Doug Davis dougd@cros.net Northern Research, Publisher http://www.couch-potato-marketing.com/ezine Getting away from Usenet and, some lists, into the real nitty-gritty of internet marketing, signatures have become a way of sticking that extra ad in there. For better or worse we seem to be stuck with this practice, so don't expect it to go away soon. How wide should your signature be? Text terminals usually had and have a width of 80 characters; this means they can display just as many characters in one row. This is the practical reason why the ultimate text width of email messages and sigs should be no more than 80 characters. But this doesn't work very well in practice. We reply, we forward, we quote, and each time we do we add those little angle brackets to the lines of text in our messages, ">>>>." So we end up having short lines and long lines staggered throughout the text. This looks very unprofessional, even if you're just sending to friends. That's why all the recommendations for different line lengths. Some will not set their character length to anything greater than 72; some '74
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