Subject: Appropriate signature length

4. *****
 Q: What is an appropriate maximum length of a signature?

 A: Net etiquette (the "netiquette") and practice dictate about four
lines at a maximum. The purpose of a signature can be considered
two-fold. It gives your email address, and also acts as a visual
identifier. Often the signatures include some kind of witticism or
aphorism. Even if they are often amusing, and some very clever
indeed, they may annoy some users. But obviously they are here to
stay. If you simply cannot overcome the desire to include one, at
least make it brief. The brief ones are usually the best anyway.
   By the way, I don't personally use one. If I wish to try a pun,
or include a witticism, I try to do it in the body of my message.
(Ok, here is one pun to boggle BBS lovers. Users writing in fowl
language will be twittered. Figure this one out :-). (If I used a
quote in my signature it would probably be "Sounds like a good idea,
but let's use it nevertheless" or "Where there is a will, there is a
won't" or more seriously "I might be here but my soul's gone bike
riding". There are more in ftp://garbo.uwasa.fi/pc/ts/tspun16.zip.)
   At worst there are multi-line signatures with elaborate ascii
drawings. They can be entertaining in a sense, but basically they
are but bloated ego-trips, a waste of bandwidth, and severely
frowned upon in the official Usenet net rules.
   One further thing. You can have your signature automatically
included in unix mail systems. Put your signature in a file called
.signature in your main directory.
   From Raymond Chen: "The permissions on the .signature file and
its enclosing directory must be appropriately set.  Ask your system
administrator for details."
   For more on the .signature file permissions, see the information
in ftp://garbo.uwasa.fi/pc/pd2/tspost16.zip, the item "Re: creating
a signature".
   For more on signature questions see Britt Klein's excellent
regular FAQ posting to the news.newusers.questions.

 A2: At least if your user id does not contain your name, apply a
signature identifying who you are. I for one find it somewhat
impolite to get emailed queries from users who do not even care to
identify themselves. In fact the probability of getting a useful
answer, or an answer at all, is severely decreased if you don't
identify yourself. Use the same courtesy as you would in ordinary
non-electronic communication.
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