Signature (e-mails in business transactions)

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This article or paragraph presents the situation in Germany . Help us to describe the situation in other countries.

Signatures at the end of an e-mail make it easier to contact you, for example in the event of a telephone inquiry or checking the legal status of the sender. With the increasing use of e-mails in business correspondence towards the end of the 1990s, companies voluntarily switched to putting telephone and fax numbers and addresses at the end of the e-mail. With the increase in e-mail traffic, the legislature saw itself prompted to act in the interests of legal security for the parties involved.

Business letters

In the last few centuries business letters were written on paper and sent in the original or as a copy by post, telex , fax or messenger . For business letters, the mandatory information for the author has been regulated by law. These applied to business letters on paper (i.e. by post or as a fax copy) and not necessarily for e-mails. It was therefore to be made clear that e-mails are also part of business letters. The legislature therefore extended the formal requirements with effect from January 1, 2007.

Austria

In Austria, the needs described above were taken into account with the 120th Federal Act of October 27, 2005 in the form of the “Commercial Law Amendment Act” (HaRÄG). The current law has the name "Unternehmensgesetzbuch (UGB)" and regulates in its § 14 (1) that the entrepreneurs entered in the "Commercial Register" must also provide company-related information on all business letters addressed to a recipient, regardless of the medium used this information is mandatory for a company's website.

Germany

On January 1, 2007, the legislature extended the following paragraphs, among others, with the law on electronic commercial registers and cooperative registers and the company register, EHUG :

Content and mandatory information in the signature

The following information must be included in a business letter and thus in (the signature) of an e-mail in commercial correspondence:

exact company
including the business form of the author, as it is entered in the commercial register
Place of establishment
or the registered office of the company with a correct postal address
Register court
with the company's registration number in the commercial register
Corporate officers
  • GmbH: Name of all managing directors and, if applicable, the chairman of the supervisory board - each with at least one full first name and the family name
  • Companies whose partner is not a natural person (such as GmbH & Co. KG) all information on the personally liable company is required
  • Stock corporations must contain all members of the management board and the chairman of the supervisory board with their family name and at least one full first name; the chairman of the supervisory board must be identified as such

Further information such as telephone and fax numbers, company logo, department, website are voluntary, are part of "good manners" and facilitate quick and direct contact in business dealings.

Information on invoices

For the information on invoices, there are additional binding requirements for the mandatory components, which result primarily from the sales tax law.

Affected groups

Affected by the legal rules, all merchants within the meaning of the German Commercial Code (HGB) in Germany and his colleagues. The managing directors are ultimately responsible for the implementation of the legal regulation in operational practice .

For entrepreneurs not registered in the commercial register, the provisions of the trade regulations (GewO) applied until March 2009, which stipulated as mandatory information on business letters:

  • at least one full first name,
  • Surname (family name),
  • summons address,
  • in the case of several partners in a BGB company, all this information about each partner

Since March 2009 the corresponding § 15 GewO (old version) no longer applies. The IHK advises entrepreneurs not to forego the information.

Differentiation from electronic signature

The signature described here in e-mails should not be confused and is independent of an electronic signature ; it has nothing to do with this. Up until June 30, 2011, the legislature required an electronic signature for the transmission of invoices by email to the invoice recipient.

Formal requirement

The legislator stipulates that the information must be “easy to read”, font size, color and background color must be selected so that the information is sufficiently easy to recognize, for example for older people and for both the text on the screen and on a hard copy. Information that is added as a file attachment therefore does not meet the requirements, especially since it cannot be assumed that they can be opened by every user.

The DIN standard 5008 , which among other things regulates the design of business letters, gives further recommendations on the form. As DIN, it is not legally binding.

Signature separator in emails

It is well-established convention , a signature be separated by a signature separator from the message body. This consists of a line that only contains the string " -- " (two hyphens and a space). This enables most e-mail programs and newsreaders to recognize a signature and automatically suppress it when it is quoted in the answer.

Sanctions

Administrative penalties by the registry court in the event of a violation can amount to up to 5,000 euros. In view of the threat of warnings from competitors , merchants should ensure that this information is given in full on all non-internal emails.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Press release from IHK Bonn / Rhein-Sieg, accessed on June 12, 2010
  2. ↑ Mandatory information for invoices Website of the Stuttgart Region Chamber of Commerce, accessed on June 12, 2010
  3. ↑ Mandatory information on business letters. Hamburg Chamber of Commerce, archived from the original on January 16, 2014 ; Retrieved June 12, 2010 .
  4. ↑ RFC 3676 The Text / Plain Format and DelSp Parameters (4.3 Usenet Signature Convention)

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