Recently we stumbled across an old article on Medium.com stating several reasons why you shouldn’t include images within your email signature. While we would agree that using an image for your entire email signature is crazy and somewhat annoying to the people receiving emails from you, images, logo and profile pictures have become a common feature in many email signatures.

The article listed 5 main reasons why images within an email signature are a bad idea, so let’s explore them.

1. There’s no guarantee it will look nice on the other person’s email or even show up. According to the article “some people’s email clients automatically resize images on the other end”. This is actually incorrect, what actually happens is that some people’s email clients automatically ignore the resizing within the HTML of the email signature. So if you include a large image, but then resize that image within the HTML that image will be shown at it’s original size. The simple solution to this is not to resize images via HTML. See our recent article on exactly why this happens and how to fix it https://www.emailsignatureguru.com/gmail-signature-images-appear-huge/
2. It can get your email marked as possible spam. This statement is highly unlikely unless your email is also full of images, and the title is SPAMMY. (If that’s a word). Most email packages will mark where their email signature starts, which allows for better SPAM filtering.
3. They will be blurry. Really? Most websites, even back in 2014, would include images large and small. It’s true that taking a large image and compressing it can create a poor quality and blurred version, however most resizing tools available online do an excellent job.
4. They multiply the size of an email. “Many email clients have size restrictions, some even just 1 or 2kb”. Wow, really, those guys running off such restrictions need to upgrade to some useful. Most Internet email account. such as Outlook.com or Gmail, have a limit of some 20 megabytes (MB) and for Exchange accounts, the default combined file size limit is 10 MB !!
5. They’re just plain annoying. I guess it’s a matter of choice and taste if your email signature includes huge images and is poorly constructed that I guess it would be very annoying. However, if your email signature is tastefully done it can be extremely impactful and also inform the reader about your organisation.

A bad email signature can have a negative impact on your company, and brand, however, there are plenty of organisations who include images, logo and even personal profile pictures within their email signatures. So, the final word. “Examine what companies and agencies you admire do for their email signatures, and copy that.”