A signature block (often abbreviated as signature, sig block, sig file, .sig, dot sig, siggy, or just sig) is a personalized block of text automatically appended at the bottom of an email message, Usenet article, or forum post.
A signature block (often abbreviated as signature, sig block, sig file, .sig, dot sig, siggy, or just sig) is a personalized block of text automatically appended at the bottom of an email message, Usenet article, or forum post.
An email signature is a block of text appended to the end of an email message often containing the sender's name, address, phone number, disclaimer or other contact information.
"Traditional" internet cultural .sig practices assume the use of monospaced ASCII text because they pre-date MIME and the use of HTML in email. In this tradition, it is common practice for a signature block to consist of one or more lines containing some brief information on the author of the message such as phone number and email address, URLs for sites owned or favoured by the author—but also often a quotation (occasionally automatically generated by such tools as fortune), or an ASCII art picture. Among some groups of people it has been common to include self-classification codes.
|\_/| **************************** (\_/) / @ @ \ * "Purrrfectly pleasant" * (='.'=) ( > º < ) * Poppy Prinz * (")_(") `>>x<<´ * (pprinz@example.com) * / O \ ****************************Example of a signature block using ASCII art.
Most email clients, including Mozilla Thunderbird, Opera Mail, Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express, and Eudora, can be configured to automatically append an email signature with each new message. A shortened form of a signature block (sometimes called a "signature line"), only including one's name, often with some distinguishing prefix, can be used to simply indicate the end of a post or response. Most email servers can be configured to append email signatures to all outgoing mail as well.
An email signature generator is an app or an online web app that allows users to create a designed email signature using a pre-made template (with no need for HTML coding skills).
Signature blocks are also used in the Usenet discussion system.
...orist it's an unnecessary optimization and a (to use your words) "performance hack", but I'm interested in a Real operating system --- not a research toy. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Theodore Ts'o bloom-beacon!mit-athena!tytso 308 High St., Medford, MA 02155 ty...@athena.mit.edu Everybody's playing the game, but nobody's rules are the same!
Businesses often automatically append signature blocks to messages—or have policies mandating a certain style. Generally they resemble standard business cards in their content—and often in their presentation—with company logos and sometimes even the exact appearance of a business card. In some cases, a vCard is automatically attached.
In addition to these standard items, email disclaimers of various sorts are often automatically appended. These are typically couched in legal jargon, but it is unclear what weight they have in law, and they are routinely lampooned. [3] [4]
Business emails may also use some signature block elements mandated by local laws:
A party can sign a document for the purposes of Section 4 [of the Statute of Frauds] by using his full name or his last name prefixed by some or all of his initials or using his initials, and possibly by using a pseudonym or a combination of letters and numbers (as can happen for example with a Lloyds slip scratch), providing always that whatever was used was inserted into the document in order to give, and with the intention of giving, authenticity to it. [8]
While criticized by some [ who? ] as overly bureaucratic, these regulations only extend existing laws for paper business correspondence to email.
The Usenet news system standards say that a signature block is conventionally delimited from the body of the message by a single line consisting of exactly two hyphens, followed by a space, followed by the end of line (i.e., in C-notation: "-- \n"). [9] [10] [11] This latter prescription goes by many names, including “dash dash space”, "sig dashes", "signature cut line", "sig-marker", "sig separator" and "signature delimiter". It allows software to automatically mark or remove the sig block as the receiver desires.
-- Brad Templeton, publisher, ClariNet Communications Corp. in...@clari.net The net's #1 E-Newspaper (1,160,000 paid sbscrbrs.) http://www.clari.net/brad/— a real example from Brad Templeton posting in rec.humor.funny in 1995 showing sig dashes. [2] [12]
Most Usenet clients (including, for example, Mozilla Thunderbird) will recognize the signature block delimiter in a news article and will cut off the signature below it when inserting a quote of the original message into the composition window for a reply. Although the Usenet standards strictly apply only to Usenet news articles, this same delimiter convention is widely used in email messages as well, and email clients (such as K-9, Opera Mail, and Gmail [13] commonly use it for recognition and special handling of signatures in email.
On web forums, the rules are often less strict on how a signature block is formatted, as Web browsers typically are not operated within the same constraints as text interface applications. Users will typically define their signature as part of their profile. Depending on the board's capabilities, signatures may range from a simple line or two of text to an elaborately constructed HTML piece. Images are often allowed as well, including dynamically updated images usually hosted remotely and modified by a server-side script. In some cases avatars or hackergotchis take over some of the role of signatures.
With FidoNet, echomail and netmail software would often add an origin line at the end of a message. This would indicate the FidoNet address and name of the originating system (not the user). The user posting the message would generally not have any control over the origin line. However, single-line taglines, added under user control, would often contain a humorous or witty saying. Multi-line user signature blocks were rare.
However, a tearline standard for FidoNet was included in FTS-0004 [14] and clarified in FSC-0068 [15] as three dashes optionally followed by a space optionally followed by text.
There is a long-standing convention in Usenet news which also commonly appears in Internet mail of using "-- " as the separator line between the body and the signature of a message.
A bulletin board system (BBS), also called a computer bulletin board service (CBBS), was a computer server running software that allowed users to connect to the system using a terminal program. Once logged in, the user can perform functions such as uploading and downloading software and data, reading news and bulletins, and exchanging messages with other users through public message boards and sometimes via direct chatting. In the early 1980s, message networks such as FidoNet were developed to provide services such as NetMail, which is similar to internet-based email.
Electronic mail is a method of transmitting and receiving messages using electronic devices. It was conceived in the late–20th century as the digital version of, or counterpart to, mail. Email is a ubiquitous and very widely used communication medium; in current use, an email address is often treated as a basic and necessary part of many processes in business, commerce, government, education, entertainment, and other spheres of daily life in most countries.
Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) is a standard that extends the format of email messages to support text in character sets other than ASCII, as well as attachments of audio, video, images, and application programs. Message bodies may consist of multiple parts, and header information may be specified in non-ASCII character sets. Email messages with MIME formatting are typically transmitted with standard protocols, such as the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), the Post Office Protocol (POP), and the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP).
The Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is an Internet standard communication protocol for electronic mail transmission. Mail servers and other message transfer agents use SMTP to send and receive mail messages. User-level email clients typically use SMTP only for sending messages to a mail server for relaying, and typically submit outgoing email to the mail server on port 587 or 465 per RFC 8314. For retrieving messages, IMAP is standard, but proprietary servers also often implement proprietary protocols, e.g., Exchange ActiveSync.
An email client, email reader or, more formally, message user agent (MUA) or mail user agent is a computer program used to access and manage a user's email.
Outlook Express, formerly known as Microsoft Internet Mail and News, is a discontinued email and news client included with Internet Explorer versions 3.0 through 6.0. As such, it was bundled with several versions of Microsoft Windows, from Windows 98 to Windows Server 2003, and was available for Windows 3.x, Windows NT 3.51, Windows 95, Mac System 7, Mac OS 8, and Mac OS 9. In Windows Vista, Outlook Express was superseded by Windows Mail.
An email address identifies an email box to which messages are delivered. While early messaging systems used a variety of formats for addressing, today, email addresses follow a set of specific rules originally standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in the 1980s, and updated by RFC 5322 and 6854. The term email address in this article refers to just the addr-spec in Section 3.4 of RFC 5322. The RFC defines address more broadly as either a mailbox or group. A mailbox value can be either a name-addr, which contains a display-name and addr-spec, or the more common addr-spec alone.
X-No-Archive, also known colloquially as xna, is a newsgroup message header field used to prevent a Usenet message from being archived in various servers.
UTF-7 is an obsolete variable-length character encoding for representing Unicode text using a stream of ASCII characters. It was originally intended to provide a means of encoding Unicode text for use in Internet E-mail messages that was more efficient than the combination of UTF-8 with quoted-printable.
When a message is replied to in e-mail, Internet forums, or Usenet, the original can often be included, or "quoted", in a variety of different posting styles.
Address munging is the practice of disguising an e-mail address to prevent it from being automatically collected by unsolicited bulk e-mail providers. Address munging is intended to disguise an e-mail address in a way that prevents computer software from seeing the real address, or even any address at all, but still allows a human reader to reconstruct the original and contact the author: an email address such as, "no-one@example.com", becomes "no-one at example dot com", for instance.
--, a string of two hyphen-minus characters, may approximate or refer to:
yEnc is a binary-to-text encoding scheme for transferring binary files in messages on Usenet or via e-mail. It reduces the overhead over previous US-ASCII-based encoding methods by using an 8-bit encoding method. yEnc's overhead is often as little as 1–2%, compared to 33–40% overhead for 6-bit encoding methods like uuencode and Base64. yEnc was initially developed by Jürgen Helbing, and its first release was early 2001. By 2003 yEnc became the de facto standard encoding system for binary files on Usenet. The name yEncode is a wordplay on "Why encode?", since the idea is to only encode characters if it is absolutely required to adhere to the message format standard.
NOV, or News Overview, is a widely deployed indexing method for Usenet articles, also found in some Internet email implementations. Written in 1992 by Geoff Collyer, NOV replaced a variety of incompatible indexing schemes used in different client programs, each typically requiring custom modifications to each news server before they could be used. In modern NNTP implementations, NOV is exposed as the XOVER and related commands.
Many email clients now offer some support for Unicode. Some clients will automatically choose between a legacy encoding and Unicode depending on the mail's content, either automatically or when the user requests it.
The hyphen-minus symbol - is the form of hyphen most commonly used in digital documents. On most keyboards, it is the only character that resembles a minus sign or a dash so it is also used for these. The name hyphen-minus derives from the original ASCII standard, where it was called hyphen–(minus). The character is referred to as a hyphen, a minus sign, or a dash according to the context where it is being used.
HTML email is the use of a subset of HTML to provide formatting and semantic markup capabilities in email that are not available with plain text: Text can be linked without displaying a URL, or breaking long URLs into multiple pieces. Text is wrapped to fit the width of the viewing window, rather than uniformly breaking each line at 78 characters. It allows in-line inclusion of images, tables, as well as diagrams or mathematical formulae as images, which are otherwise difficult to convey.
Control messages are a special kind of Usenet post that are used to control news servers. They differ from ordinary posts by a header field named Control. The body of the field contains control name and arguments.
Usenet, USENET, or, "in full", User's Network, is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979, and it was established in 1980. Users read and post messages to one or more topic categories, known as newsgroups. Usenet resembles a bulletin board system (BBS) in many respects and is the precursor to the Internet forums that have become widely used. Discussions are threaded, as with web forums and BBSes, though posts are stored on the server sequentially.