Discouraging corporate e-mail footer with image

June 10, 2009 8:52 AM

How do I discourage my workplace from adding a e-mail footer (including a 6KB gif) to all our e-mails?

My workplace has recently started automatically adding a footer to everybody's e-mail. Not only does it include one of those silly legal disclaimers but it also includes a 6KB gif of the company logo, which means that every single e-mail shows up as having an attachment. To add insult to injury, I've now effectively been ordered to send e-mail at HTML rather than plain text so that the logo shows up properly.

posted by alby to computers & internet (13 comments total)

Explain to them that many, many, many email servers (including other companies...perhaps ones your office does business with) will filter-out your email as spam and, perhaps, blacklist your domain as a spammer.

Additionally, you need to also point-out that not everyone sets-up their email reader to view as html. In fact, point out that many security best-practices call for email to be read as plain-text in order to avoid any nasties hidden within the html.
posted by Thorzdad at 9:00 AM on June 10 [1 favorite]

I feel your pain. I've tried various arguments. Sometimes I talk people out of it, sometimes not, but I have found one way that's been 100% effective to date...

A few e-mails from customers, clients or suppliers asking that you please stop sending them "attachments" works wonders. These coincidental complaints may need to be... encouraged, of course.

Should this fail, I have considered escalating to some of those automatic "your e-mail was rejected because it contained an attachment" messages, but haven't yet had to go that far.
posted by rokusan at 9:01 AM on June 10 [3 favorites]

Tell them that some of the larger, stricter companies will block all inbound emails with image attachments by default. The recipient then has to get their IT department to allow it through and it will be a royal pain in the arse for all involved.
posted by qwerty155 at 9:05 AM on June 10

If it were me, I wouldn't bother as my opinion would surely be considered unimportant. But apparently you think your bosses are more open to persuasion than mine.

The gif image is for branding. Your e-mail correspondents see the company logo, get the company's brand in their head, learn it's something they can trust. Something like that. I don't know anything about marketing.

Anyway, at one company I worked at, our branding solution was standardized signatures. Your name was in Times New Roman/bold/black/10pt; your phone number was some other typeface, and the company name was in a bright color at the bottom. It actually looked like a logo. Everyone's signature looked the same, so if a client was e-mailing with multiple employees, they would see how organized we were with our e-mail signatures, be impressed, and give us more money. So you could use that as a suggestion.
posted by Dec One at 9:07 AM on June 10

get a few customers to complain
posted by Flood at 9:34 AM on June 10 [1 favorite]

If you can find a manager that will play along - set their email to plain text and send them an email from your account. Let them see what they are sending people. Be prepared to follow up with all of points listed above, and add to that the reason that people don't accept html emails (hint: viruses).
posted by The Light Fantastic at 9:51 AM on June 10

Use a cost metric. Guess the number of emails and the total burden of server use and its cost. No idea if this would make a dent but business is most sensitive to money concerns. Emphasize this cost would provide no benefits, as Outlook would not display the .gif without user action for security reasons.
posted by Ironmouth at 10:15 AM on June 10

Why html email is bad

Why images in email are bad

I'm in IT. HR sends a weekly email to all staff, full of spinning icons and what I'm sure are lovely pictures, with platitudinous health advice. Most of us delete it immediately. HTML can carry active (malware-carrying) content. HTML and images are comparatively huge. I always have my mailreader set to text only, so all those pictures? I don't see them.

If you have something to say, say it. I can read.
posted by theora55 at 10:28 AM on June 10

Where do you work? I'll call and complain that I got one of those emails. :)
posted by Brian Puccio at 10:36 AM on June 10

I deal with people who have e-mail signatures with inline images all the time and have worked in places where I had an image in my signature. Never had a problem with any ISP rejecting e-mail based on images/image attachment, and no, none of the e-mails from them has an attachment icon.

I've *never* run into an issue over HTML e-mail, it just works. I say get off your high horse and deal with it.
posted by wongcorgi at 10:55 AM on June 10

I'd use the Spam angle first since there is no way I would ever see any email coming from your company, it would get kicked down at the door.

Some companies have tight email filters. I know that several large media companies block anything with an attachment with no ability to put you on a whitelist. And there's no spam bucket for them to look through for ham, it's just gone.

If you want yet another strategy, think about email archiving costs. A plain text email will usually be 2k or so. That same HTML email with an 6K image will likely be 20k or more. (Depending on how your email app does HTML. Most make horrible coleslaw.) So suddenly your email archive is 10x as big. And if the people at your company have mailbox quotas, the number of messages it can hold just dropped to 1/10 what it was before.

Getting clients to complain is a good idea too, but I don't think you'll have any problem with that, they'll likely do it on their own.
posted by Ookseer at 11:04 AM on June 10

You won't convince them. I had to quit using Thunderbird as my email client due to a company rule that all outgoing email must be 10 point Verdana. No amount of persuasion could convince anybody that if the person on the other end has their email set to be read in purple 26 pt Comic Sans, they won't be seeing my Verdana anyway. When I got a reply from somebody in purple Comic Sans, it would be my fault for not using Verdana. I gave up and submitted to the Borg. Sometimes it's your only option.

Thankfully, they did just make the confidentially notice optional - so I removed it from my sig file immediately.
posted by COD at 11:11 AM on June 10

Let's put it this way: I know you're right, and you know you're right, but that doesn't amount to a hill of beans. Fact is, you're a Dilbert, and your boss is Pointy Haired. But he's still the boss. So, just swallow the bitter medicine — you'll survive. And save your righteous rage for a more important battle.
posted by exphysicist345 at 9:30 PM on June 10