You may remember me stating in the past that I have an aversion to e-mail signatures. Well, I found something that is the sure-fire cure to those overly long e-mail sigs.

And that’s Krunchd (pronounced as it looks, "crunched").

I created a Krunchd page http://krunchd.com/menga. I included the all the social networks I participate in, my web site and so on. It was stupidly easy to do and only took a few minutes to set up.

Once you have your Krunchd URL you’ll receive an e-mail where you can add/remove/modify anything on your Krunchd page. So if you happen to join up with a new social network or have other blogs you author, etc., this can come in really handy.

Krunchd is especially handy as an e-mail address signature. As you know, you can’t modify e-mails you’ve already sent. Once you’ve sent them, that’s the way they are for life. But with a Krunchd link in the signature, any time someone clicks on it, your most up-to-date information is present.

Very cool, very easy, very useful.

Check it out at www.krunchd.com.

One of the very few e-mail signatures that I don’t consider a complete waste of space is ASCII art. This is because getting a signature where letters form a picture or cartoon-like figure is not easy and difficult to get right.

If old-school ASCII is your thing, there is a Java application (runs on any OS that supports Java such as Windows/OS X/Linux) called JavE that is a full GUI-based ASCII “image” editor.

In the video below I show you how to get it, use “fonts” within it and how to convert images you have into ASCII text for use as an e-mail signature.

I send and receive quite a few e-mails. Years ago I used to have quite a hefty e-mail sig on every one of my e-mails that looked something like this:

[First Name Last Name here]
E-Mail: [e-mail address here]
AIM: [AIM screen name here]
Phone: [phone number here]
Web Site: [web address here]

This original sig was 5 lines long. And to the best of my knowledge it never assisted me in keeping communications with anyone.

Starting in late 2007 I came up with new signature, that being no signature at all. I eliminated it completely. Any e-mail I send now has absolutely no information at the tail were the sig would go.

The end result: People who communicate with me regularly - including new people - don’t have any problems keeping the information flow going. So it would appear (at least as far as I can tell) that the e-mail sig truly is a waste of space that serves to be nothing but e-mail clutter.

If you’re the type that absolutely must use an e-mail sig and don’t want to let it go, here are my suggestions:

1. Don’t use custom formatting and/or fonts.

Sooner or later you’re going to end up e-mailing someone using a Mac or a PC with Linux - and they’re not going to be able to see your Windows fonts at all. Stick to unformatted text. No bold/italic/underlined stuff. No custom fonts.

2. Don’t put an image of yourself in your sig.

If you do this, every e-mail you send has an image file attachment. And that means some (if not a whole bunch) of the e-mail you send will be flagged as SPAM. There are tons of people - including yours truly - that don’t open attachments at all. So don’t do it.

3. Do only input things in your signature that matter.

You only want to have information in the e-mail signature that people could actually use.

For example, having your name, instant messaging screen name and web site is fine.

Having your e-mail address in the sig is not okay because they already have it the moment it arrives in the recipient’s inbox.

Having "taglnes" with funny quotes is not okay because this is nothing but clutter. Have you ever received an e-mail where the signature with tagline is longer than the actual e-mail itself? I bet you have. I have and I can’t stand it.

General rule of thumb: If your e-mail sig is longer than the actual e-mail content, your sig is too frickin’ long. Shorten it or get rid of it.