Email signatures

I am a huge sucker for sparsity. Have you ever been in one of those retail stores that has only two shelves, and yet still manages to stock everything you’re looking for?

By now my room is a hopeless wreck, with about fifteen years of accumulated crap filling the corners and the shelves, hiding everything I actually want, which is inconvenient (like my copy of Supreme Commander, which mysteriously disappeared last week and hasn’t resurfaced). But when I move in another month or so I’m going to sort of “reset” everything and see how that goes.

This also extends to my computers. I like clean desktops. I’m upset that when I installed BootCamp on my MacBookPro it made a second icon for my Windows HDD. That’s one too many icons.

If I absolutely have to get something read, or processed, or somehow done, I’ll put it on my desktop, because it will bug me until I can put it somewhere else.

And so it is also with e-mail signatures. I think the vast majority of e-mail signatures are cumbersome. How could they not be? Let’s look at all the stuff you want in a signature, ideally:

• Name

• Company

• Company URL

• Personal URL

• AIM/Skype

• Job Title

• Email address

• Phone number

• Fax number

• Confidentiality statement

That’s a lot of stuff to fit elegantly at the bottom of an e-mail. I want to craft a signature for myself, but before I can have one I need to figure out how to compact all of that into something that looks clean.

I’m thinking I can probably get rid of Name and Email address right off the bat, because I usually sign my name to e-mails and my address is, well, right there in the “From” bar. I also don’t yet have a Fax Machine, so that’s a problem I can put off until later.

That still leaves me with Company/URL/URL/AIM/Job Title/Phone number/Statement.

Maybe I could simply put in a link to a full profile on my web site. Any sweet ideas?

You may now proceed to ignore most of my post and tell me in the comments that I must like the Apple store. Which I do.