Signature (emails and postings)

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Mozilla Thunderbird displays signatures in light gray

As a signature text section is called, which is often at the end of emails , Usenet - posts or posts in Internet forums is and contains information on the sender.

background

The use of signatures in Usenet is due to the fact that the sender of a post did not always appear in the header . The header for the name and email address of the sender ("From:") was only introduced in 1983 by RFC 850 . It was also possible that individual headers of e-mails or Usenet postings were cut off on the way. In order to make it clear to the reader in a simple manner who a message came from, it has become generally accepted to insert contact information at the end of the message.

The details of the sender's full name in the signature is still their right to exist, because according to RFC 822 , only 7 are bit - characters allowed in the header. 8-bit special characters must be encoded. Names with German umlauts can be mutilated, which means that the recipient cannot read the name in the From field. For this reason indication sender in the From field should one for the transcription are used (for example, "Andre Mueller" instead of "Andre Miller"). If the e-mail is then concluded with a greeting that does not use the sender's name - for example "Your André" (special characters can be used in the body text if this has been specified in the header, see Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions ) - , the recipient does not get any information about the correct spelling of the sender's name. By specifying the name in the signature, this is counteracted without the salutation losing its personal character.

shape

The previously common restriction of the length of the signature to four lines of 80 characters each is rarely common today. It was justified with the high connection costs and the low transmission rates. In business e-mail, for which special provisions in Germany since 2007 regarding the provision of contact information etc. Ä. apply, it is not taken into account. The vCard is an alternative to the signature .

An established convention is to separate a signature from the message text using a signature separator. This consists of a line that only contains the string " -- " (two hyphens and a space). This enables most e-mail programs and newsreaders to automatically recognize a signature and not to quote it when replying.

Example of a signature: 

Hallo,
das ist ein Beispieltext, um Signaturen zu demonstrieren.
Viele Grüße
Max
-- 
Maren und Max Mustermann
Musterstr. 8, 12345 Musterstadt, Deutschland
Tel.: +49 333 88888, Fax: +49 333 88999
Web: www.example.com  E-Mail: mustermann@example.com

Differentiation from electronic signature

The signature described here in e-mails should not be confused with and independent of an electronic signature ; it has nothing to do with this.

Legal situation in Germany

Mandatory information according to the law on electronic trade and cooperative registers :

  • Name of the company
  • Place of commercial establishment
  • Register court
  • company registration number
  • executive Director
  • Board members
  • Chairman of the Supervisory Board

Other uses

Taglines and ASCII art

A special kind of signatures are the once common in mailboxes used taglines. Here it was customary to attach a short saying, a one-line joke or a sentence with a wisdom to his echo mail. Against this background, such short sayings are still called taglines even today, even if they are used, for example, in e-mails or forums . (See also Fortune .)

In addition to spreading contact information and taglines, the signature is also often used to represent ASCII art .

Signature programs

Programmers' signatures sometimes contain the source code of a small computer program , for example a " JAPH ". Conversely, short programs whose source text would find a place in a signature are sometimes referred to as “signature programs”, even if they were never part of a signature. The following example (source see web links) contains - in addition to the usual content in a signature - the source text (here colored green ) of a program in the programming language C that calculates prime numbers : 

main(x,y/* Patrik Lundin |       xxxxxx@xxxx.xxxx.xx         */){for(;x++;)
for(y=2/*  Docentv. 28   |        xxxxxxx@xx.xxxx.xx        */;x%y;)printf(
++y/x+/*   977 52 Luleaa | http://www.ludd.luth.se/~lundin */"\0%d\n",x);}

Web links

swell

  1. ↑ RFC 822: Lexical Tokens , and RFC 5322: Lexical Analysis of Messages
  2. ↑ cf. RFC 1855 , section 2.1.1
  3. ↑ Cf. Charles H. Lindsey: Usenet Best Practice , 2005 (English), also RFC 3676: The Text / Plain Format and DelSp Parameters , Section 4.3, 2004 (English) and RFC 1849, known as "Son of RFC 1036" , Section 4.3.2, 2010 (first 1994, English).