Do you send out emails from your smartphone with something like “Sent from my Iphone/Blackberry” written at the end of it? You MAY be annoying recipients… here’s why and a much better alternative.
Why do people get annoyed (I disagree with ALL the reasons)
A recent survey I read (I haven’t been able to relocate a link to the original article) on the web found that many people find the “Sent from my Smartphone” signature annoying. According to the survey, respondents felt that it implied that:
- The sender could be showing off because the particular type of phone may be a status symbol (I have to admit… I like showing off my IPhone… I just wish the IPhone 4 hadn’t come out so soon after I bought my IPhone 3GS)
- The sender is too busy to address the recipient properly
- The sender doesn’t know how to change the signature (I read this as saying that I was too stupid to change the signature… again I have to admit I had not even bother to look for this but it was easy enough to find under settings on the Iphone)
I don’t agree with most of the above. It does not bother me when I read “Sent from my Smartphone” at the bottom of emails I receive.
In fact… it tells me that although the person was out of the office, they still thought that I was worth responding to immediately… and that the person has good taste if the email says “Sent from my Iphone”.
A Better Signature for Emails Sent from Iphones
Although I don’t have any problems with the default signature, based on a suggestion in the article I have now changed my signature to read:
Sent from my IPhone. Please excuse the brevity, spelling and punctuation.
I think the above is great… I get to show off my phone… I show respect for the recipient… and they will know why some mistakes may creep through (sometime I don’t notice that my IPhone has changed words that it thinks I have misspelled)
What do you think of the default “Sent from my…” signature? Do you have a better alternative?
Please let me know by leaving a comment on the blog.
I think if someone is more concerned about ‘Sent from …’ messages, rather than the message content, and moreover is already making excuses that the message content may be wrong, I do not want to deal with that person.
I agree with Steven, particularly to the apologizing in advance for your unwillingness to check your spelling and punctuation.
Whatever brownie points you think you get by responding quickly–and I don’t think you get any–you’ve now thrown them away by saying in effect, “I don’t care about my correspondence (or you) enough to check my spelling and punctuation.”
PS The iPhone OS recently improved its spell-checking, which makes the excuse even lamer!
How do you change the signature for a Blackberry? (8830 from Verizon)
Go to your message list, click the menu button and choose ‘options’ from the list. Under Email Options go to ’email settings and click. Scroll down to the ‘use autosignature’ option and make sure it is set to ‘yes.’ Then scroll down to the autosignature message and delete the text, edit it to whatever you want it to say. Click the back button and click ‘save’ when prompted to save your changes.
I have already changed my signature. I took out the reference to the make of phone as it is irrelevant.
IF it were good practice to includ hardware details we could get a signature at the end of an email saying, “send from my Dell Latiture xxx with 4GB memory and 350GB HD.
Most signatures from your desktop/laptop include contact information like phone number. I find it very useful when receiving the email on my IPhone to be able to easily place a call if needed. ‘Sent from my phone’ doesn’t help me.
With your contact number in the email, I can easily place a call from the email.
In my company we decide to delete the original message in the Blackberries, and simply include the name of the employee and the name of our company.
Simpler and better.
PD: Sorry if my english is not good enough.
I’ve done a combination of both. I’ve pasted a copy of my normal Outlook Signature into my phone signature and followed it with a similar “Sent from my phone. Please forgive the brevity and any misspellings.”
I take the reference to the type of phone that I have, because it’s NOT an iPhone. 😉
If I didn’t think that people would take me less seriously, I would change my signature to “Sent from my Federation Standard Issue Communicator” What the heck I’m going to do it anyway!
One very simple suggestion with a BlackBerry is to delete the auto-signature and use the “Autotext” feature (now known as “Word substitution” in OS6) instead, to create different signature blocks for different situations. Each of these is then assigned to a short code.
Examples:
– “tj” becomes “Thanks, John” (complete with line breaks)
– “tjb” becomes “Thanks, John Brown + Work address and contact details, etc (all correctly spelled with no need for further checking)
You can, of course, create other short codes for entire blocks of text. I know of one man who has complete contracts pre-assigned to “c1”, “c2”, etc. I’ve yet to find a similar function in either an iPhone or Android device.
Incidentally, since BlackBerrys have had built-in spell-checking for some years, the whole issue of having to apologise in advance for any mis-spellings goes away.
Alternatives can be:
– Sent from a 3G network (or other equivalent)
– Not sent using a desktop or laptop
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