How to write a professional email signature

Your email signature is the only part of your email that every recipient sees every single time. A good one quietly answers "who is this, and how do I reach them?" A bad one becomes a small daily annoyance: a giant logo, three phone numbers, a row of social icons, an inspirational quote and a legal paragraph, stacked under a two-line reply.

The good news is that a professional signature is mostly about leaving things out.

What a signature is actually for

A signature has two jobs. First, to identify you: your name and what you do, so the reader has context. Second, to give the reader one or two ways to take the next step, usually a phone number or a website. Everything else has to earn its place against those two jobs.

What to include

• Your full name. The way you want to be addressed.
• Your job title. It tells people what you can help with.
• Company name, if you work for one.
• One phone number, the one you actually answer.
• Website, if it helps the reader.
• Pronouns, if you'd like to share them. Increasingly common, and helpful for people who aren't sure how to address you.

That's usually three to five lines. You don't need your email address; the reader already has it.

What to leave out

• Quotes and slogans. They look personal the first time and strange by the tenth email, especially in a serious or bad-news conversation.
• Multiple phone numbers. Office, mobile and a second mobile make people guess. Choose one.
• Long rows of social icons. Include LinkedIn if it's useful for your work. Nobody needs your company's Pinterest in a support reply.
• Your full postal address, unless people genuinely need to visit or post things to you.
• "Please consider the environment before printing this email". Nobody prints email anymore, and the line itself becomes clutter on every message.
• Different fonts and colours. Use your email's normal font, and at most one accent colour.

The trouble with image signatures

Designing the whole signature as one image, or adding a big logo, seems like the easy way to look polished. In practice, it causes several problems:

• Images are often blocked. Many email apps and company systems don't load images automatically, so the reader sees an empty box or a broken image icon, and none of your contact details.
• They show up as attachments. Some apps attach the image to every email, so every message looks like it contains a file. Colleagues searching for real attachments hate this.
• They can't be copied. Nobody can copy a phone number out of a picture.
• They trigger spam filters. Emails that are mostly images are a classic spam pattern.
• Dark mode can ruin them. A logo with a transparent background and dark text can become invisible when the reader uses dark mode.
• Screen readers can't read them, which makes your details inaccessible to people with visual impairments.

The fix: write your signature as real text, and if you use a logo, keep it small (roughly 150 to 200 pixels wide), give it a white or solid background, host it on your website rather than attaching it, and add alt text with your company name.

Examples you can copy

Simple and professional

Sara Malik
Senior Accountant, Brightline Consulting
+44 20 7946 0123 · brightline.co.uk

Freelancer or consultant

Daniel Okafor
Brand and Web Designer
danielokafor.design · linkedin.com/in/danielokafor

Customer support team

Priya, Customer Support
Northwind Home · Help centre: help.northwind.com
Mon–Fri, 9:00–18:00 (UK time)

Showing your working hours in a support signature is a small kindness: it tells customers when to expect a reply without them having to ask.

Student or job seeker

Ali Hassan
BSc Computer Science, Final Year, University of Leeds
+44 7700 900123 · github.com/alihassan

Replies and forwards: use a shorter version

Your full signature is useful in the first email of a conversation. By the fifth reply, repeating it just makes the thread longer. Gmail and Outlook both let you set a separate, shorter signature for replies and forwards. Your name and title is usually enough.

Legal requirements for company emails

In some countries, business emails count as business letters and must include certain company details. In the UK, for example, a limited company's emails must show its registered name, registration number, place of registration and registered office address. Germany and several other EU countries have similar rules. If you run a registered company, check your local requirements, and put these details at the very bottom, in small plain text.

Long confidentiality disclaimers ("If you are not the intended recipient…") are a different matter. They're common, but in most situations they have little legal effect. If your company requires one, keep it as short as your legal team allows.

A security thought most people never have

Your signature tells the world your exact name, title, phone number and how your company formats its emails. That's precisely what a scammer needs to impersonate you or your boss convincingly. It's one reason fake "CEO" emails look so real.

That's not a reason to hide who you are, but it is a reason to leave out things you don't need to share, like your personal mobile number, and to confirm unusual requests by phone. Our guide on checking whether an email is real explains how.

How to set up your signature

Gmail (on a computer)

1. Click the gear icon, then See all settings.
2. On the General tab, scroll to Signature and click Create new.
3. Type your signature, and choose it under Signature defaults for new emails and for replies/forwards.
4. Scroll down and click Save Changes.

The Gmail phone app has its own separate signature setting (in Settings, under your account), which is plain text only.

Outlook (web and new Outlook)

1. Go to Settings → Accounts → Signatures (in some versions, Mail → Compose and reply).
2. Create a signature, give it a name, and choose it as the default for new messages and for replies/forwards.
3. Click Save.

Test before you trust it

Send an email with your new signature to yourself and a friend, and open it on a phone, a computer and in dark mode. Check that every line is readable, the links work, and nothing appears as an attachment. If you'd like to see how it looks in an inbox that isn't yours, send it to a temporary email address; the message appears within seconds and deletes itself afterwards.

The test of a good signature

A good signature is one your recipients never think about. They find your number when they need it, they know who you are, and nothing about it distracts from what you actually wrote. If yours passes that test, it's done.