Save the planet: stop printing email signatures
Many of our clients have really long email signatures, but the emails they are sending quite often need to be printed. Looking at the size of our paper recycling mountain, this seems a collossal waste. The problem becomes worse when it becomes a thread of conversations back and forth, each time carrying the same mound of useless signature copy.
The first issue here has to be the legal reasons for having email signatures - disclaimers, copyright info etc. But surely these don’t have to be repeated every time throughout a conversation?
At the heart of this is technology, particularly the way email signatures are handled by email software. Given the most signatures have standard elements, it shouldn’t be too difficult for software to spot a signature, and then strip it out. I seem to remember Thunderbird starting all email signatures with two characters to indicate that the signature starts, and Thunderbird is an obvious product to pioneer this type of functionality, potentially through an extension.
Any volunteers?
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