List Members FAQ

What's a sig line? How long should it be?

(aka Can I include every great quote or website I've ever heard or visited? How about all this nifty ASCII artwork I made?)

A sig line is what you put after your name, it can be any number of things, your email address, your personal or business website, personal or company information, a quote you really like, your philosophy of life, a website you really like, ASCII art (making images out of text, similar to emoticons, for more info, check out Google's ASCII Art category) or just about anything else you want to put there. With HTML email, you can also include images or insert things like the current weather report for your locale. Commonly used email programs (Outlook Express, Eudora, etc.) and other mail providers (Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL, etc.) usually give you some method of automatically inserting your sig line before sending out your email.

As you can imagine, people can get carried away sig lines, I've personally seen sig lines that are more than 40 lines long! That can be very frustrating when the actual content of the email is very small, a few lines or even just a "me too!" comment. So, as with snipping text when replying, be kind to your fellow list members and the internet, keep it succinct and to the point. The general recommendation is no more than five lines up to 70 characters each. Also check the list rules because many lists have rules about sig lines, either limiting them in length or restricting what type of content you can have or disallowing them altogether.