Someone asked if she should include a picture of herself in the signature line of her email. I wrote back advising against it. Not everyone uses Outlook plus using an image in the signature adds weight to the email, which makes it slower to deliver and hog the recipient’s mailbox.

Some email applications translate the background image into a single image and it looks weird. When this first happened to me, I couldn’t understand why there was an image of a moon attached to the email when it had nothing to do with it. I realized the person used a stationery or signature with the image and it didn’t translate well in Thunderbird.

I’m on some excellent mailing lists and enjoy reading the quality discussions. Other than the usual pet peeves of people not following basic mailing list etiquette, emails with colorful fonts and fonts like Comic Sans make me clench my hands. They’re hard to read and not professional (some of these lists are professional-related).

Boring as they are, Verdana and Arial work best for emails. If you want to do something different for a special occasion, that’s okay. But to use color and funky fonts for every email message is going to rub folks the wrong way.

Meryl K. Evans is the Content Maven behind meryl's notes, eNewsletter Journal, and The Remediator Security Digest. She is also a PC Today columnist and a tour guide at InformIT. She is geared to tackle your editing, writing, content, and process needs. The native Texan resides in Plano, Texas, a heartbeat north of Dallas, and doesn't wear a 10-gallon hat or cowboy boots.

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