As you clearly know, the recommended netiquette guidelines for email and group posting signatures is four lines, ideally prefaced by a single line with just two dashes, but after years of Internet evolution, lots of people ignore it and do what they want.

Even I'm guilty. Here's my typical signature now:

Count the lines and I've exceeded the recommended four. Ah well.

But there are some people who go quite a bit further with their signatures, beyond what folk find acceptable. As it turns out, on one of the groups I'm involved with, there's a discussion about one person's rather long signature, and it's exactly what you're talking about:

However you slice it, that's a long email signature!

Grayson Walker, of Smith, Walker & Associates has a quite coherent response to queries about the length and content of this email signature, however, and he's allowed me to reproduce it here:

"Several people have expressed concern about the standard disclaimer I have in my company's signature file.

"The disclaimer was written by my attorney. Although it may appear imposing, in layman's terms, it says that I own what I create. It's that simple. As to it's being unenforceable, that is a matter for the courts to decide.

"I also teach in several graduate business programs. The greatest threat to intellectual property rights and academic honesty comes from plagiarism. Plagiarism is the theft of intellectual property. In each syllabus, I discuss plagiarism, intellectual property rights, and the fact that I use www.mydropbox.com and/or www.turnitin.com to detect plagiarism. Is my goal to detect and/or catch those who plagiarize? No, for my real goal is to educate my students so they will not plagiarize, or deter them from doing so. I believe deterrence is better than detection.

"I view the corporate disclaimer similarly. Deterrence is better than detection. If it deters undesired behavior, then it is valuable. I have an aversion to fraud. I report scams and work to protect people on the Internet. If someone is interest in something I wrote, they contact me and we take if from there. It's really very straightforward."

A very interesting perspective on the matter. The exceptionally long signature is still not particularly friendly to others on the list, but the reasoning behind it does make sense, and in our present culture of cheating and plagiarism, I completely understand his perspective.

How about you? Do you have an unusually long signature in your email messages and/or do you dislike other folk with long signatures in their own messages to you?