Email signature templates

Your name, your role, your company, and one or two ways to reach you. That's the core of almost every good signature, and the order matters: name first, because that's what people scan for, then title and company so they know why you're writing, then contact details.

Add anything your job requires or your reader genuinely needs: a license number, a bar admission, pronouns, a booking link, office hours. Leave out quotes, long lists of social profiles and award badges. If a line doesn't help someone contact you or trust you, it's noise at the bottom of every email you send.

Aim for four to six lines. Past that, people stop reading, and on a phone your signature starts to push the actual reply off screen.

HTML signatures can carry logos, colours and clickable icons. They also get images blocked by default in many corporate mail clients, show up as attachments in some replies, render differently in Outlook for Windows, and tend to fall apart after a few rounds of forwarding.

A plain-text signature looks the same in Gmail, Outlook, Apple Mail, a help desk reply box, a LinkedIn message and Slack. Most mail apps still turn a typed URL, email address or phone number into a link, so you lose very little. Retext pastes plain text, which is why every template here is built to look intentional without formatting: short lines, a separator where it helps, and nothing that depends on a font.

Most people need more than one: a full version for the first email to someone new, a short sign-off for replies in a thread, and a one-liner for chat. Your mail app usually lets you set one default. Retext lets you keep all of them a trigger away.

With per-app snippets you can go further and give the same trigger different text in different apps. ;sig-work can expand to your full signature in Mail and Outlook, and to just your name and title in Slack. You type the same thing everywhere and get the right version for the place you're in.

When everyone writes their own signature, you get ten different job title formats, three versions of the company address and at least one person still listing an old phone number. It looks careless to customers, and fixing it means chasing people one by one.

With Retext for Teams, an owner or admin creates a team snippet for the shared lines, say ;sig-company, holding the company name, address and legal or confidentiality line. Each person's own signature has their name and title typed in, then pulls in the shared part with {snippet:sig-company}. When the address or the legal line changes, the admin edits ;sig-company once, and the change reaches everyone's signature on the next sync, on every Mac on the team.