I hate email signatures. Seriously. I’m still waiting for the first email signature that is actually useful. Well, there might be a few cases: The first email from a person where I don’t have any contact information AND I do want to communicate with that person in other ways than email. Or, the first email from a person that just changed contact information AND I do want to communicate with that person in other ways than email. Or, … no, wait, that’s about it. After scanning my inbox, I realize that those cases amount to less than 0,001% of all the signatures I receive. So what is the bulk of email signatures about?

• Legal nonsense… “This email is confidential BLABLA” Those are the most annoying signatures and by far the longest. Why the hell would I care?!?
• Funny jokes… mostly not funny.
• Generic wisdom. Famous phrases by famous people.
• “Sent from my iPhone/Blackberry/younameit” … no comment
• Too much contact information.
• Redundant contact information, like the name and the email address of the sender… OMFG
• Pictures. Seriously, PICTURES! Sometimes even animated.

Unfortunately, this list ist not complete. And the worst thing is repetition. Whatever signature is below the email, I get it EVERY SINGLE TIME someone sends me an email. The more email I get during one conversation, the harder it becomes to pick out the useful information. It’s pretty hard to laugh about a joke every single time you read it (mostly during a single day). And so on and so on.

I might rewrite this post for it to be more catchy but I guess you got the point. I hear about many people with the same problem but nobody seems to do anything about it. So, this morning I decided to start killing my signatures. One way would be directly on the server as part of my email filter. Procmail could be used for that. However, since my filtering won’t be perfect I don’t want to alter the mail itself. Maybe I’m cutting out useful information. It’s enough to just hide the signature. Next stop: My email client, Thunderbird. Thunderbird has some pretty powerful features to alter the appearance of an email. But I’m no expert, so all I did was adding a few lines to the userContent.css which should be in the chrome-folder of your Thunderbird profile directory. If it does not exist, you can just create it.

.moz-txt-sig, .moz-signature {
 display: none !important;
 }
 .moz-txt-sig > a, .moz-signature > a {
 display: none !important;
 }

This hides most of the signatures thunderbird recognizes. But not all. As a first step that’s ok but I do get a lot of non-standard sigs that I want to hide, too. Actually, the worst sigs I get are non-standard.

Some sort of sophisticated ad-block is needed here that parses the email and recognizes signatures. So let’s collect strings or expressions that are common in marking the beginning of a signature like “–”, “—” and so on. Then, Thunderbird should assign a css class to that part of the email. We can subsequently format it using rules in userContent.css. That’s the idea.How exactly would this be done the Mozilla-way? Or maybe there is a better solution?

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